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Chapter Text

[5 September 1943]

Love,

I am writing this as you duck out for last-minute supplies. Most of your things are packed. You have only one suitcase. How is it that we have spent nearly ten years together and all of your earthly possessions fit in one small suitcase? We have removed you from our flat with such ease that I am left breathless. When you are gone, I will have almost nothing left to remember you by. You will not have forgotten to take anything, except me.

Where will you be when you read this, I wonder? I will tuck it at the bottom of your suitcase so you will find it when you unpack your things. It will be your first night in your new home—I know you will not wait days to unpack like I would. I hope you have eaten. Are rations in the U.S. as strict as they are here? Please have some butter for me. And sugar—God, I miss sugar in my tea.

I miss you already. I am writing this letter and you are just down the road and I miss you so fiercely it hurts. What am I going to do without you? I have asked myself that question every day since you received that offer from Miss MacTaggart. Do you remember those two blackthorn trees on campus outside the old dorm, the ones that grew into each other? Inosculation, it's called. I feel like that, with you. My roots and branches have grown into yours. To separate you from me would be to damage me irreparably. Yet I must learn to survive that irreparable damage. I must learn to navigate this world as only half of myself, while the rest of my soul goes with you, across the Atlantic, half a world away.

I hope you do not miss me even a tenth as much. I hope you find your work in the U.S. profound, fulfilling, and far better than that mediocre lab you suffered here. I am not sure if you are aware, but they announced Thomas Hawthorn as your replacement some days after you informed them of your departure. If I ever see that man again, I will punch him this time, I swear. You will probably laugh when you read this. I can imagine your derision: Charles Xavier, punch anyone? And not at a pub drunk off his arse, brawling over some meaningless squabble? Well I would. I was stupid to stop you that night. I wish we had tackled him together and beat him into a crying mess. The things he used to say to you are right off one of those horrid Nazi posters, and the fact that you shared classes with him for nearly two years without committing homicide is quite beyond me.

I digress. Will you miss my digressions? The way a conversation with me takes twice as long as it should, as you like to say? I think you will. I hope you will. I hope you miss even the parts of me that annoy you. But did I not say only half a page ago that I hoped you would not miss me at all? I hope you miss my silly inconsistencies which vexed you every day.

I hear New Mexico is hot and it hardly rains there. I know you cannot tell me exactly where you are, but I am imagining cacti and lizards and sand. Please do not dispel my illusions until you are back in my arms to kiss away my disappointment. And please do not get bitten by a snake. That sounds like a dreadful way to go, and you cannot send telegrams when you are dead.

You will write to me often, won’t you? Every two weeks at least. That is about how long the post will take to travel from New Mexico to Oxford, I think. If you don’t write, I will send you letters every two weeks anyway until you are sick of me.

Please write.

I think we will have to be more circumspect in future communications, as our letters may be way-laid or discovered by prying eyes. But since I am delivering this letter to you personally, I will dare to be more direct.

I love you. My dear, my darling, I love you. Many who know that MacTaggart has been meeting with you have wished you fair winds and a significant contribution to the war's end, but I have different wishes for you: stay safe and come home to me. I will be waiting.

Yours always,
Charles

[18 September 1943]
To Doctor Charles F. Xavier,
c/o University of Oxford Department of Biochemistry

Arrived safely. You were right. It's hot.

[29 September 1943]
[ADDRESS REDACTED]
To Doctor Erik M. Lehnsherr,

You cannot imagine how excited I was to receive your letter. I have not been so overjoyed to receive a piece of mail since Santa Claus wrote me back when I was six. The post came early this morning so I put your envelope in my pocket as I went down to the lab and I savoured the weight of it all day long. It was not until I came home and had made supper and sat down that I took out your letter and finally read it.

This is not to make you feel guilty for writing such a brief missive. Rather it is to impress on you the fact that even the shortest letter from you fills me with immeasurable happiness. Write me ten words every fortnight. Write me two. Write only my name. But write me, and never stop.

The flat has been so quiet without you. I play the news on the wireless every night, but it is not the same without your acerbic commentary. All the news of the war is much more tedious and depressing when you are not here to mock the stupidity of it all. But I am so deeply relieved that you are not here. I know you never wanted to go, you hated the thought of being driven out of your own home, but I am so grateful you were not brave this once. Britain may hold strong for now, but the war seems never-ending and every day there are new rumours about some fantastical invention the Germans have built to wipe us off the face of the earth. Mrs Davies is convinced a second Blitz is coming. I know you think she is daft, and most of the time she really is, but there is such a tension in the air sometimes here that I cannot help but think she may be right.

You are safe in New Mexico. That matters more to me than anything else.

How is your work? Can you speak of it at all? I met a boy today named Henry McCoy. He is a graduate student who is to be my new lab assistant. He is a little shy but obviously brilliant. I think we will work well together. I also think he has his eye on Raven, which makes me like him less. Then again, every lad has his eye on Raven, and even Henry McCoy is not immune. She is leaving again soon, which you know I hate. At the very least it will put her out of reach of the Henry McCoys of the world.

Going forward, I do hope that not all of your letters will be so… terse. But I know you wish to pretend at being a man of few words, so if you find yourself at a loss for things to say, perhaps we could speak the language that always made the most sense to us.

Pawn to D4.

Yours,
C. F. Xavier

[12 October 1943]
To Doctor Charles F. Xavier
c/o University of Oxford Department of Biochemistry

Please do not be so good-natured about my undue curtness. It makes everything I detest about this horrible desert chafe more.

Yes, you will tell me now that I always resented the rain in Oxford and I should be glad now to live in a place where rain is so scarce that its presence is celebrated. You will remind me that I have suggested several times that we move out of the heart of the city and settle somewhere where I do not wake already irritated by the sounds of bicycle bells and buskers. You have teased me that if I felt as much about Oxford, how much more I must detest the rest of the world, even more crowded and clamourous. I ought to relish the limited traffic of this facility, finally a place with nothing to distract me from the synthesis of quantum theory and electro-magnetism, you will say. Well, fuck off, Charles. Why don’t you take the four day journey from London to Baltimore followed by the thirty hour railroad journey to Santa Fe, the three days dawdling in an intelligence front disguised as a store, and the additional two hour drive to the compound, which is still under construction, and tell me to count my blessings then.

Were you in Oxford the summer of 1932, or were you in the States then? Do you remember how hot it got that August? I had just arrived to begin my post-graduate studies. My parents were still in Berlin then, and with the sun roasting me, with my worry for them always tugging at my thoughts like a spoilt child, the only relief I could get was to sweat my way to a place on the Cherwell a little further north than the Rhea and walk into the river until it washed over my head. There is no river here, and every day is as hot, and I find myself pre-occupied again with thoughts of someone dear to me, and far away.

There is little to say of the compound thus far. The roads are dirt. Everything is under construction. The houses are small things, hastily built, on exposed foundations. Somehow they are more spacious than the narrow corridors of our your terrace, and I think, looking upon this desk, bed, and kitchenette, you would say that it suits me. I’m not sure if it does or doesn’t. Most of my time thus far has been spent in the spectrometry lab. At least they have spared no expense in the construction of the equipment, although the walls are open as new sections are added on, and the sun is inescapable. Several others are here already: chemists, physicists, engineers, and radiographers. There is a small library where the head librarian, the wife of a physicist, seems to always be catalouguing one thing or another. I think she is significantly more skilled than her husband, who is more of Oppenheimer’s toady than a mind alight with discovery. Before you become too excited, the library is only scientific papers and reports, and Mrs Serber is far stricter than your old Mrs Dallow. A few days ago I forgot to put away the specifications for the Berkeley cyclotron and I was involuntarily appointed the next night inspector.

I think you would like Mrs Serber.

The fences are barbed wire. From the outside, I imagine it looks much like the forced labour camps Ruth used to describe in her letters

There is scant more to say of the work, as I am in the early stages of a literature review, save that I do believe, even more now than I once did, that it will be significant.

You speak of refuge, but surely you know that if it were not for the promise of the work—important work, timely work, necessary work—nothing could have ever driven me from your side. Not even your own brand of 'charm' managed that nearly a decade ago. A rational accounting of the situation pointed me toward America and this weapon which might win the war. I know that I must be here, and I know that you can’t be here too. But I hate it. Every day, when I wake, I think longingly of shirking my duty and disappointing my people. I could not wait for the bus to Santa Fe; I would take one of the horses and somehow get it to the city. How hard could it be? I would be on a train, and then on a ship, and then at our your door too quickly for even a telegram. The look of dazed delight on your face. And then I open my eyes and I rise and stare at critical mass calculations for the next ten hours.

Thank you for the game and the gossip as well. I move my pawn to D5. Please remind Raven that scientists make poor spouses.

That’s all I can think of to say

I hope you do know that if I do not write as much or as often as you would wish, it is not out of lack of thought of you. I am constantly thinking of you. I burn in the heat and worry for your fair skin, forgetting that you are not only a brisk walk away, as you were in Oxford. I take down the more outrageous things Mr Serber says in our shorthand, planning vaguely to share them with you over dinner. I frequently find myself thinking that I should not be so sharply aware of your absence, but everywhere I go, I deceive myself that you are with me. Why would I tell you of the sun, or the dirt, or the various idiocies of my so-called colleagues, when you were there with me as I experienced them? It is only when I look over and you are not there that I remember. And when I sit to write, the words sometimes desert me. Everything seems too mundane to bother noting. There is only colour and verve with you. Even the news bores me now. But if you would like I could certainly devote a portion of my next letter to acerbic commentary of the war’s various convulsions.

I know it’s not quite a promise from Santa, but I will write again.

E. Lehnsherr

[25 October 1943]
[ADDRESS REDACTED]
To Doctor Erik M. Lehnsherr,

When I arrived at work this morning and found your letter waiting for me, I abandoned all else and stood in my office reading it a dozen times over, carefully absorbing each word. Each pass reminded me again—as if I needed the reminder—of how badly I miss you. You have been gone for six and a half weeks, and each day has been agony. I don’t know how much longer I can endure being separated from you, and yet I know it will be much longer. Judging by the reports from the front, we are not any closer to victory now than we were when you left. Only God knows when this war will end. I wish I believed in Him the way you do.

I struggle to imagine you in a desert. Your raincoat is such a part of you, as is that ratty brolly that you refuse to let me toss. I wonder if you remember that you had that same brolly with you that night we went drinking with the lads at Cross Keys. It was one of the first times we went out together, and after everyone else had dispersed at 3 or 4 a.m., I invited you to a night-cap at mine. I thought for sure you would refuse. You had such a reputation for being aloof and unsociable. But you accepted. It started to rain on the way back to my flat and I had forgotten my brolly at home. You opened yours and held it over me, and I looked up at you with your hair beginning to curl and flatten in the damp and thought, Well now. There’s a lad.

I was mistaken. You did not stuff everything you owned in that suitcase. It seems that I find something that reminds me of you every few days. The other day, I opened the hall closet to find that brolly tucked into the back corner. You’ll hardly need it where you are, but I had the irrational urge to wrap it up and send it over to you. Instead, I’ll keep it until you return.

Am I boring you? I will admit my correspondence skills are not up to par. I have not carried on a conversation through long-form letters like this in years. You know the only person I regularly write to is Raven, and in that case, 'regularly' is a relative term. I keep my letters with her brief because I know she has not the attention for anything longer, but with you, I find myself recording every thought that passes through my head. It is a poor substitute for having you here with me in the evenings, listening patiently to my prattling as you assemble supper. But it is what I have, and I hope you don't mind my inability to be concise.

All this to say, I hope the weather in New Mexico becomes more agreeable to you, or at least more tolerable.

I was in New York at the family house in the summer of 1932. I remember it being damnably hot that summer also, and I kept telling Raven I missed the London rains. Well New York must have heard me because a huge thunderstorm swept the city one evening and for a few hours, it was like we were back home. Despite our nanny’s warning that we would catch a cold, Raven and I ran out into the rain to escape the heat, but after it was over, we only ended up wet and hot. It was miserable.

Why Erik, I am dear to you? How I cherish those words. You ought to say them more often.

It amuses me to think of you being chastised by librarians. I thought you might have left that behind at Oxford, but perhaps some things never change. Mrs Serber sounds like a formidable woman. I would very much like to meet her one day.

That your work is so meaningful fills me with pride and joy for you. I hope it is a decent consolation. But now that you have put that thought into my mind, I cannot help but wait in breathless anticipation for the scrape of your key in the lock. The tiniest noise sends me flying to the door. I wonder what Mrs Lewis thinks of me throwing the door open a dozen times a day. She cannot possibly disapprove of me any more than she already does, though perhaps she will stop glowering at me now that you have disappeared and she is no longer forced to speculate about the wicked and sordid nature of our relationship.

If you cannot come back to Oxford, perhaps I will come to New Mexico. What if I showed up at your door? Improbable with your security measures, I know, but what if I did? I have a brain, perhaps your employers could use me. Are they recruiting biologists? Does Oppenheimer need a secretary? Do ask. Then perhaps I could come share that desk, bed, and kitchenette with you, and we could dispense with this whole idea of written correspondence.

I will remind Raven that scientists make poor spouses. I will also wonder how it is that you could possibly know this.

(That was a cheeky remark, if you were in doubt.)

I am the same as you. I spend all my days cultivating a list of thoughts and observations that I intend to share with you when I come home, only to find that you are not here. Then when I sit to write you these letters, all those thoughts and observations become laughably insignificant, hardly worthy of being included in what limited space I have. I ought to devote this ink to telling you how I feel your absence as keenly as a wound. How hard it is to sleep now that the bed beside me is empty. How I sometimes sit at our kitchen table for hours on end lost in memory, trying my damnedest to conjure you into being.

However, I think if I write about nothing but that, I may find myself overcome, and as I still must get up this evening to fix supper, I will refrain from plunging into that morass of emotional devastation.

Instead, I will tell you one thing that I saved for you this week: the Joneses down the road have had a new baby and her name is Lily. A girl at last after four boys! Cecelia is ecstatic. I let them take what they needed from my ration card this month. God knows they need it.

I will not ask you to write about anything specific. Only remember to write, even when you are extremely busy with the matter of preserving the free world.

Knight to F3.

Much love,
C.

[8 November 1943]
To Doctor Charles F. Xavier
c/o University of Oxford Department of Biochemistry

I have only just begun to review recent experimental approaches developed here and at other American research sites to separate isotopes by mass. The military commander here does not want us to be aware of anything more than our own specific task, but I have my own suspicions as to why I in particular was recruited, given my specialty in magnetic field calculations, and Oppenheimer does not believe in operational security anyway. New scientists are arriving all the time and it is very unlike Oxford, which is not known for its strong physics presence. At the canteen today a chemist I didn’t recognise began speaking with me avidly about Fermi’s experiments on magnetic fields and mercury vapour. He said that when he had last spoken to Fermi in Chicago he had said that if my theory of electro-magnetic repulsion had been in circulation when he won the Nobel, he might have worked out fission earlier. I’m not even sure the other physicists at Oxford, even the ones that aren’t utterly asinine like Hawthorn, know about my dabbling in atomic theory.

The last time I was around so many people who spoke this language of neutrinos and spin was when I was in Copenhagen. This is leaving aside the quantity of fellow Jews here. I feel I ought to enjoy it more than I am. Recently I have begun re-reading Joliot-Curie on beta decay. I’m sure you know she won the Nobel with her husband around eight years ago. That’s only happened once before, a married couple winning a Nobel together. Then it was her parents, Pierre and Marie.

Have you ever considered studying physics? But genetics suits you in a way I cannot imagine anything else would. There is not enough genetics here, I find myself thinking at strange times.

Keep the umbrella. You never remember to buy one of your own. I won’t be around to come to your aid when you’re sprinting down Castle Street holding a newspaper over your head. Perhaps missing me will remind you to bring it with you. Perhaps you may even escape this autumn without your requisite two head colds.

I am still wearing the raincoat around. It’s quite light and protects from the sun. When you see me again, I will be wearing this coat, I expect. When you imagine me in the desert, you need not worry that I’ve undergone any significant change. I’m always the same. I’ll be the same when I return, too.

You never bore me, though I sometimes think I ought to bore you, with the way I prefer an enclosed life. I do not miss the pubs or the social clubs you would drag me along to at all.

I do remember the Cross Keys, though. I was still hot over your intervention into the beating I was planning to give Hawthorn and so when I’d heard Mulford had invited you I almost didn’t go. But Mulford had been giving me intelligence about Glen’s thesis on sonoluminesence, so I felt obligated. I was determined to avoid you, but you seemed to have already decided that we would be the best of friends. You monopolised me all night, or perhaps I was the one who monopolised you, and you proved yourself to be sly, and funny, and worst of all interesting. And when it began to rain, you looked so pathetic and bedraggled that it felt as if I had no choice in the matter but to cover you. I have never been able to explain my reactions to you. Even these letters are as inexplicable to me as the drenching I got that night. The hold you have on me is strange and illogical. Do you like that about our partnership?

I have written to Mrs Davies asking that she make sure you eat something other than university slop and cigarettes. She may be paranoid, but her pickled eggs are fine and she knows how to make potato pastry, which is more skill than you have. You are expected for supper there twice a week.

Please give my congratulations to Mrs Jones. Pawn to E6.

E. Lehnsherr

[22 November 1943]
[ADDRESS REDACTED]
To Doctor Erik M. Lehnsherr,

I wish I had paid more attention during the handful of physics lectures I attended so that I could understand more of your work. The significance of mercury vapours and electro-magnetic repulsion eludes me, but I do know that unique joy and excitement of embarking on a promising new project, surrounded by those who are equally eager to do the work. More than anything, I am happy you have found like minded people there. You told me once you never quite felt as if you belonged at Oxford. I hope that where you are now, and wherever you go in the future, you will feel as if you have a place that is rightfully and comfortably yours.

How glad I am also that you are in the company of fellow Jews who are not afraid to say so. Did I mention in my last letter how relieved I am that you are so far away now? Even if I did, let me say it again: I am thrilled that you are far away. Hitler may train his gaze on England and the Soviets, but he is too pre-occupied here to concern himself with the States. You are safe.

And yet, even knowing that, I am besieged with worry that the Nazis will launch a counter-offensive on the U.S. They have not the man-power or equipment to invade America in earnest, I know, but the Axis has proven its ability to wreak havoc on American soil. What if they are planning another Pearl Harbor? What if they have infiltrated the American public? What if there is a Nazi spy there now, feeding Hitler intelligence on the American defences, warning him of the danger of this weapon you are assembling? Hitler could not allow that threat to go unaddressed, and there you are, my love, in the middle of it all.

Have I mentioned I have been sleeping poorly since you left?

Are you imagining us as the Curies? Famed and flattered the world around, flush with the admiration of all the scientific world? Alas, physics has never been able to arouse in me more than a faint, passing curiosity, a superficial appreciation for the natural way of the world. It is far too dry, with far too many numbers involved. Besides, what need have I to learn physics? That is why I have you, physicist in residence. I am glad to hear you have not found a geneticist to replace me. I hope the dearth of genetics in New Mexico continues indefinitely.

The best part of any head cold is having you here to make me tea and soup, and as that is currently impossible, I am doing my damnedest to fend off any hint of illness. That includes carrying that tattered brolly around and resigning myself to missing you every time my eyes fall upon it. Did you realise two of the spokes are quite crooked? The whole brolly looks unbalanced and funny when opened. Perhaps I'll attempt to repair it before you return.

I dream of you in that raincoat. Promise me you will stay the same. I don't think I could bear it if you were different. I expect you to come home and for us to pick up exactly where we left off. If you are different, I will remember all over again that you were gone, and that will not do. For the same reason, I hope to stay the same as well, though it is hard to tell if I am changing, as I see myself and am alone with myself every day. You will have to be the judge when you see me again.

The feeling is mutual, my dear: I could not even conceive of a world where you could bore me. When you lecture me on theoretical physics, I listen with bated breath, only because it is you. When you are made furious by news on the wireless or in the papers, I am filled with breathless excitement at your passion. Even when you are sleeping, when you are doing nothing more interesting than taking the requisite breaths to keep yourself alive, I could stare at you for an eternity and never look my fill.

However, this does not exempt you from accompanying me to social clubs and gatherings in the future when we are together again. You may never bore me, but there are times you can forget what it is to have fun, and I consider it my duty to prevent you from becoming a complete social recluse. You must bear my ministrations with good humour. Why? Because I said so.

I thought you might not remember Cross Keys so well, that perhaps it was a memory I alone had treasured. And perhaps it is not so bad a thing to be pathetic and bedraggled, if it inspired you to stay by my side. If it makes you feel any better, I have never been able to explain my reactions to you either. You bewitch me, even from America. Each sentence you write is a spell that snares my soul. Do I like this about our partnership? I like that I have a similar effect on you as you do on me. This way it does not feel so pathetic to be rendered speechless and breathless at the very mention of your name.

In other news, a few days ago I went into Thornton’s for a new pen, as my last one suffered the quiet, ignoble end of slipping from my bag somewhere between the university and the flat. You know how fond I was of that pen, so I retraced my steps a full three times before resigning myself to the fact that it was indeed lost forever. I imagine it is now floating among all the other sewage in the Thames, or in the possession of a particularly literary rat.

In any case, I went into Thornton’s and, well, you know how I lose my mind in there. That place is one of Weyl’s 'one-dimensional tubes'; I enter through the door and am instantaneously transported to another dimension where there is no war, there is no need to be conserving funds, and all that matters in the world is my insatiable appetite for books and fine stationery. (There, is that enough physics for you, my dear physicist?)

In the end, I walked out with three new books and two pens, one of which I have enclosed with this letter. I know you abuse your pens quite terribly, and the one I packed in your suitcase has probably already perished. Please treat this one kindly, it is a match to my own.

Pawn to E3.

Yours,
C.

P.S. Thanks to you, Mrs Davies now comes puttering up to our door and bangs on it quite horribly every Tuesday and Friday until I consent to come to supper at hers. I am then compelled to spend at least two hours listening to her suspicions about which of the neighbours might be German spies, or how the government’s most recent ration restrictions is an insidious attempt to starve out the weakest of the public to prepare the strong for the inevitable invasion. I do pity her though. It is coming on two years now since her son has been missing and presumed dead on the front, and I imagine she is quite lonely. We keep each other good company, I think.

[4 December 1943]
To Doctor Charles F. Xavier,
c/o University of Oxford Department of Biochemistry,

I received the pen you enclosed with your last message, although I hardly know what you expect me to do with it. In lieu of anything better I have been marking technical diagrams with it. I suppose you want me to use it to write these letters, in which case I will remind you that it is 1943 and that your insistence on hand writing your own letters only increases the chances of my mis-reading your aside that you mishandled equipment in the laboratory as that you mishandled ejaculations in the lavatory, which would be very unfortunate for you, me, and the censor reading this.

I do not wish to commit more ink to the war today. My apologies for not being able to satisfy your apparent craving for my impatience with the state of the world. I don't know if you mean me to be flattered that my absence is apparently benefiting your health. Nevertheless, you must resign yourself to the return of your colds and sniffles when this is over, as I have deemed them an acceptable price to pay for seeing you once again.

It is strange that you mention a fixation on my most mundane qualities. I often thought that was a unique property of my affection for you.

It is fairly surreal to see many faces that I had consigned to the shadow of an emptied out Copenhagen and Leipzig. There is even a girl here with whom I attended school. She was much younger than me. I was in the upper school when she was in the lower school. Her family left a little before mine did. Her name is Lilli Hornig now, but when I knew her it was Lilli Schwenk. I don’t know if she recognised me. Though I cannot tell you where precisely in New Mexico we are, I can tell you that it is very different from Berlin. I cannot blame her if she has made the choice to put the entirety of that time behind her. She was young enough at the time to let it fade out of memory, as I was not.

Work proceeds apace. I have spent more time arguing with idiots who fundamentally misunderstand how a mass spectrometer works than I really care to tell you. When I complain to Robert, he insists that my understanding of the principles of electro-magnetic separation are of critical importance to the project. In fact, he says it so often that I still wake in a cold sweat sure that he is in the room. No one, of course, is in the room. Not Oppenheimer, and not you.

I did not realise how difficult it would be to receive news of the latest air strike second or third hand. I find even the terrible university bunker grows more palatable in my memory.

Your horrible 'potato peel pie,' however, I still detest.

Many of the… let’s call them laboratory assistants… here are adherents of John W. Campbell, but you know I’ve never had any patience for that science-fiction stuff. There’s one P. O. Box for the entire compound and every month it is overflowing with copies of 'Astounding Science Fiction'. I’ve been ordering books but their delivery is haphazard at best. Last month I attempted to order the latest Raymond Chandler novel. Yes, I can hear you already deriding me for preferring grisly crime novels to 'the expansive imagination of scientifiction.' I hope my disdain is equally vivid for you. Also, this book is meant to take inspiration from Arthurian legend. Perhaps you ought to try Chandler again. Everyone here hates detective stories even more than you.

The mail order bookstore didn’t send me the Chandler book, though. They sent me a children’s book instead. I would’ve given it to one of the lab assistants’ children but I grew so desperate for lack of stimulation, other than the technical reports from the chemical companies in the library, that I’ve read it several times by now. Strangely, it reminded me of the fantastical travelogues I so loved in school. 'Gulliver’s Travels', perhaps, but there is a sense of optimism to it that I think you would appreciate.

In awaiting news from Oxford, a few lines from the book have stayed with me. I am reminded of Lyons, four years ago, when I told you that the pain of love is so much greater than the joy of it. You looked at me as though I had started speaking Greek. Or perhaps a language you didn’t learn in your hideously expensive boarding school. Then you said—do you remember?

The prince in the book said, What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.

Pawn to C5.

E. Lehnsherr

Post-script: You ought to be kinder to Mrs Davies; she is doing you a great favour by ensuring you don’t faint from hunger in the middle of your lectures. You’re just unduly suspicious of old women because you fear they all want to feed you up and make you try on the sweaters they’re making for their own children, which in fairness you are right about. I’m sure you will develop a rapport soon enough. Simply turn her attention to the flavour of suspicious gossip which you do enjoy. I’m sure she will soon develop opinions on whether Florey will ever stop pontificating about how researchers ought not to be humanitarian in their aims.

[11 December 1943]
Charles,

Have you ever tried to drink laboratory ethyl alcohol?

I don’t know what else was in that punch but it has given me the ability to see the structure of atoms in the walls. I think I can solve the enrichment problem. I think I can develop a unified theory of elementary particles. I think I love you.



Charles. Never drink laboratory ethyl alcohol.

Apparently the chemists have these parties every night.

I am very glad Otto Frisch has not yet invented a method of distilling magnetism into spirits. I do not think my body could survive many more nights like these. I think perhaps even your iron liver might not be able to withstand the 'punch' here. Chemists are truly a different breed. I bless my sense every day that I chose a bio-chemist, not a pure chemist, for our partnership.

I wandered outside this morning in an attempt to dispel my joint pains. For a place this far south, it gets shockingly cold at night, and in winter. I had to go back in before sunrise proper as I thought my eyeballs would fall out of their sockets. I do not know if it will snow here. It’s too early in the season to have snow in Oxford, isn’t it? Still I suspect you are not keeping as warm as you should. You know you are susceptible to head colds.

I think you would enjoy the sunrises here. They are very, very red.

Having not yet received your reply to my previous letter, my next move is not included.

חג אורים שמח.

E. Lehnsherr

Post-script: I had to strike it out but—you know, don't you?

[23 December 1943]
[ADDRESS REDACTED]
To Doctor Erik M. Lehnsherr,

The post has been delayed; I received your last two letters simultaneously, which was both a disappointment and a delight. You know how I treasure your words—they are at times the only joy to be had these days at Oxford, as all the news is dreary and everyone is consumed with thoughts of the war. I can hardly listen to the wireless anymore. Every time someone turns it on, it is filled with reports about the war effort and what will be rationed next, or the BBC is putting on one of those programmes about how we so love our brothers in the U.S. and in Russia and how fortunate we are to have allies on all sides. Do you remember that night we spent in my flat listening to 'Murder in the Cathedral'? I had had a couple whiskeys (or three or four) and you had had none and we lay on that ratty rug you hated and listened to all two hours of it in silence. I thought for sure you would be bored, being Jewish, but you said being Jewish did not mean you could not appreciate Eliot’s talent (though you seemed not to appreciate it when I read to you his poems on cats). In any case, they seldom play programmes like that anymore, and it is a shame.

Anyway, as I was saying, your letters came one right after the other, and therein lies the disappointment: I will now have to wait an entire month for your next one. You, on the other hand, are the lucky one; I must reply to both your letters in one, so my response will be twice as long as usual. Or are you unlucky? I can see you squinting at my penmanship. You’ll hurt your eyes muddling through so many pages of my 'tiresome scribbling.' Be sure to take a break or you’ll need glasses as I do soon enough. (Though that would mean that you can no longer mock me for them.)

I gave you that pen to write your letters, but I suspected you would defy me. Use it for your technical drawings then, or for writing letters, or for cross-word puzzles, whatever you like. I only hope that when you use it, you think of me, as I think of you whenever I drink Ostfriesentee, or when I take up the Nero Wolfe story you left with me. I am sending you a book, by the way. I thought of you as I was reading it. I think you may hate it and am eagerly anticipating your analysis.

On the topic of books, I remember reading that children's book as a boy and quite loving it. I spent all of Thursday going through all my old boxes (yes yes the ones I keep lugging from flat to flat out of nostalgia, to your great distaste) and eventually found a very worn, very torn up copy. Re-reading it, I felt close to you. I imagined you reading the same words at the same time, your fingers tracing the page. I miss your hands.

Perhaps you're right, I should try Chandler again. Sometimes I imagine myself as you, now that you're not here. I make tea and imagine what you would say about how sweet I like it. I walk to campus and imagine how you would think the rain is dreadful. I think if I read Chandler, I would see you in it.

This would be an excellent rest-stop for you to give your eyes a break from straining in the dim.

Have I mentioned how glad I am that you have work with which to occupy yourself? Your mind is too brilliant and active to be left stagnant, and it sounds as if your work is progressing at a decent clip. You are enjoying it more than you ever enjoyed any project at Oxford, I think. The Yanks are lucky to have you. Your Robert sounds as if he properly appreciates you. Perhaps too much.

Do I sound jealous? I keep thinking of the image of you flush with drink and looser limbed than usual. I used to have to drag you out to the pubs, and now others are playing my role. I’m glad for it—you are too serious when left to your own devices. But I wish I was the one there with you.

Don’t fret—the air strikes are rare now, nowhere near as constant as they were. I have not heard the sirens in many days. Nevertheless, I sleep soundly knowing you are far away, safe beyond the reach of the Luftwaffe. I do take exception to your opinion on my potato peel pie though. I sleep less soundly knowing your palate is so unrefined.

About Lyons—I remember what I said. Have you changed your mind? Have I changed your mind?

I must come to New Mexico and meet these chemists myself. They seem to be lads after my own heart. I miss drinking with you. It is lonely drinking alone. Before you say anything, I am being careful. You will not see me as I was in uni, falling and bashing my own head open and waking up with no memory of nights past. Promise.

No snow yet in Oxford, but the fog is intense. I think it will be foggy for Christmas again as it was last year. It is very cold. I am keeping warm though. I have the scarf you made me. There is a hole in one end now where I caught it on a chair. You will have to fix it for me when you return.

You know very well I can never wake early enough to see a sunrise. You will have to watch them for me.

I wish I knew when I would see you again. As the little prince said, 'If you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you.' Unlike that little prince though, my heart is always ready to greet you. I sleep and wake ready to greet you. Come back to England. I know you can't, but come.

Oh, Erik. The Tarrasch Defence? Pawn to C4.

Yours,
C.

P.S. Please be assured that your comment about ejaculations in the lavatory did not go unnoticed. The censor may object to my response, so I will leave it unsaid (though I know you can guess what I might have done had you been here within reach).

P.P.S. I know.

[5 January 1944]
To Doctor Charles F. Xavier,
c/o University of Oxford Department of Biochemistry,

It is callous of you to tell me to put down your letter part-way through and rest my eyes when you know that, from catching sight of your spiked, crawling letters on the envelope to the last punctuation mark of your post-script, I am not in control of myself. You only leave me guilty and fuming. Or perhaps this is an act of kindness from you. I admit that the way I imagined your smile, dimpled with your smugness, is clearer in my mind's eye than all my other attempts to imagine you.

It is strange, imagining you as a child, this particular book open in your hands. You always told me of looking at the illustrations in your father's ornithological surveys, or slogging your way through Dumas in the French under the instruction of your laughably over-paid tutor. Even now, you prefer a journal and a paper or your ridiculous science-fiction to a mystery or a social novel. I had not imagined you as enjoying stories about foxes and princes. I see Saint-Exupery in you or perhaps I see you in Saint-Exupery, but missing from both is what you were like as a child. When I think of this Small C. poring over this book, he leaves tea-cup stains on the pages, as you do now, and he has reading glasses, as you do now. Eventually I realise that the Small C. has become Grown C. without my say-so.

As a boy, did you gasp in wonder at the fantasticalities? Did you believe there were roses that could spurn you and foxes that waited for you to tame them? Did you know even then they were made up tales? And when you grew up and learned that there are planets where the sun rises and sets in a minute, did you think of the book then?

Is that why you became a scientist?

The men here are largely unsentimental. Perhaps it is the nature of the work we are doing, or perhaps it is an effect of our interests erring on the physical side of chemistry, rather than the biological. Physics may have its own kind of magic, but it is not, I think, the kind which enchants children in story-books. I suppose if you imagined yourself as the little prince, it is no surprise that you decided to study the stuff of life. That or the stars. You might have made a good astronomer—you certainly have a head for numbers—but I find myself glad that you do not spend even more time with your head in the clouds than you already do.

I realise now you have not spoken much about your childhood. You have no pictures, save the dismal grey one in the hall across from the kitchen. I know Raven, of course, but she speaks of you as though you have always been yourself: fussy, stalwart, brilliant, and bright. You do not have to tell me. It is who we are now that matters, and even more importantly when we will see each other again. However, I would still like to know if you had any humiliating habits as a child. Consider your options carefully; you can control what I learn or I can ask Raven.

I am glad to hear that you are looking after yourself well. With the drink and with the weather.

Thank you for the book. I greatly look forward to experiencing the adventures of Jenny, the cat. And her friend. Pickles, the cat.

When it comes to books, I wish you had not picked up the Rex Stout. It is not one of his better ones, if I recall the plot correctly. Though perhaps you may like Wolfe, the heroic, aristocratic genius, although there the similarities end. You have never shied away from the tumult of the world, promises that there will be fewer amnesiac nights beside. And you can’t tell the difference between mutton and a donkey’s rump.

My Chandler has arrived in the mail. I was going to give the other book to one of the children, but I find that I have grown attached to it. It is not your hands I imagine on the pages or your voice reading the words. But when I return to it, it feels very much like you are in the room with me; behind my shoulder, just out of sight. It is as impossible a thing as my return to England right now, I know. Come anyway. Come and sit just behind me as I read, silent but unmistakably present.

I am sure you will be intrigued by the knowledge that the compound has its own radio station. It runs a programme of music and skits, nothing very serious. They play different music here. Their jazz has quite a different tenor. I have hardly heard any Anne Lenner, though when I do I always stop and think of you. I think too of New Year’s Eve, 1937. In general I do not pay much attention to it though. Somehow someone has assembled an orchestra out of the lab assistants and their families here, and I have attended two of their shows for lack of anything better to do.

I am surprised to hear you miss the radio plays as I had always been of the impression that you listened to them for my benefit only. Perhaps it is similar to why I keep the radio on in the hopes of catching a Lenner song.

Are you jealous, C.? It’s hard for me to imagine. You were always the one dragging me out, anywhere, everywhere, the pubs, the theatre, meals with friends, student symposiums. You must know that it is only you who are able to coax me to these things. Were it not for the immediate suspension of my faculties with the first sip of punch, I would certainly have left the damned chemists’ party as soon as I had wrestled an answer about equipment delivery times from Mr Wilson. Rest assured, everyone here is either unappealingly dull or insufferable. You are both dull and insufferable, but in the most appealing possible way.

If you did come, though, I would go again to these wretched parties with you.

Enclosed please find a new scarf. It has snowed generously, but I am well supplied myself. I don’t know what I was thinking in making it except that perhaps it was habit, since you find new catastrophes in which to embroil that scarf every year, and my hands knew they ought to be doing something about that. Have I told you there is no cloth rationing here? However, going into town is so onerous that I have still been using unravelled wool instead. There is a similarly patriotic fad here of wasting not and wanting not. Mrs Duffield in the main office has taught me some interesting techniques for conserving yarn. Mrs Duffield actually got married here, on the compound, last September. She is not the only one; there have been several children born here as well in the months I have been here. It seems that it is widely felt that however many years until the war ends is too long a time to wait to carry on with real life.

Perhaps you should return to school to study physics this time. Or pure chemistry, if that is too abstract for your tastes.

Knight to C6. King’s yours,
E. Lehnsherr

Post-script: About Lyons. I don’t know.

[24 January 1944]
[ADDRESS REDACTED]
To Doctor Erik M. Lehnsherr,

Your attempts to imagine me likely surpass mine to imagine you. Not for lack of trying, I must add—I imagine you every moment of every day, standing with me, sitting beside me, offering sly jabs at the foolishness of our colleagues, or at my own foolishness. I imagine the way you used to bring me tea on Sunday mornings, extra sugar, and how you would kiss my forehead as I drowsed. I think it would not be boastful of me to say that I have quite the prodigious imagination, but even then I struggle to picture you exactly as you were, and are. Sometimes I see you so clearly in my mind’s eye, as if you were standing just before me, and then sometimes you are little more than a blur. You defy my attempts to capture you.

I am not forgetting you. I could never forget you. But I am forgetting the little parts of you, and that terrifies me. You must come home before I forget that scar above your lip, or the tiny birthmark on your back, or the way your hands fit against my skin. And when you come home to me, I will spend days learning you all over again, and remembering.

I was not always so serious in my literary pursuits (or boring, as Raven might say). I quite enjoyed fantastical stories as a boy, and still do now, though my collection may suggest otherwise. 'The Little Prince', 'Jekyll and Hyde', 'Frankenstein'—I loved all of those as a boy. I suppose the latter two are less about princes and foxes, but you take my point.

As for why I became a scientist, I believe there may be an element of the fantastical that drew me to science, and to biology specifically. Is it not fantastical to imagine that there are millions of miniscule creatures, so tiny that you and I could never see them, living within us in symbiosis, digesting our food and maintaining our homeostasis? Is it not fantastical that there are invisible motes that adhere to surfaces and float through air, and this is what causes sickness? And is it not unbelievable that within each of us are microscopic templates that give us life and make us who we are?

Is this the same fascination you have for physics?

There are not very many interesting stories to tell about my childhood. My parents took Raven in when I was nine. Before that, I was a rather dull boy. I read a lot. I played in the pond behind the house. I stacked toy soldiers on the stairs. Then Raven came along and taught me to catch frogs, and we did that every summer until I went off to uni. She was my best and only friend until I left home.

You know about the tutors and boarding school already. What to say about my parents? My father died when I was thirteen. He shot himself. That is why guns make me queasy. I know you noticed that I went through pains to avoid the skeet clubs at Oxford. I never did tell you why. Now you know.

My mother became distant after his death. She never had the most loving or maternal spirit, but after he was gone, she relinquished all responsibility over Raven and me to our nannies and tutors and made herself unavailable. This may be impossible for you to envision, as your own mother I found this quite hard to swallow as a boy, but now I think I understand. When something so ground-shaking shatters your life, it becomes difficult to give attention to anything but surviving from moment to moment, breath to breath. I think sometimes, though I try not to, of what I would do if I lost you, and I don’t think I would fare any better than my mother did. I wish I could see her again, so I could tell her I understand her now on a level I thought I never would. Loving you brought me closer to her. Another thing to thank you for.

Isn’t it curious how it is easier to tell you this through the distance of pen and paper? Why was it so difficult to say anything when you were here in my arms, close enough for me to whisper each word into your ear? What I wouldn’t give to have you here with me now, lying beside me in bed as I trace my fingers across your chest, memorising you again and again. I wish more than anything I could be telling you these stories in person.

I have gone back to re-read your letter and now remember that you asked about humiliating habits. I can think of one or two tales from my childhood that will make you laugh, but I shall save them for when you return. You must remind me when you are here. Don’t you dare ask Raven before I have the chance to tell you myself; if you care for me at all, you will allow me to set the record straight before she has a chance to distort it.

I hope you enjoy the adventures of Jenny and Pickles. I thought you might need a bit of levity in amongst your gruesome crime thrillers.

The Rex Stout is keeping me good company thus far in the evenings, and I have not found a breaking point yet. You are right about the plot though—it is rather convoluted and I sometimes find myself re-reading whole chapters in an attempt to grasp the timeline of events. Is every Stout story quite so twisted? Though that is the genre, I suppose. Wolfe is an intriguing character at least, and I do like him, though not for the reason you may think. He and I may share the aristocratic background, but in all else, he is more you. He hates to leave his home; he prefers to allow others to interact with the world in his place. He would be happy to be left alone, if everyone else would consent to it. He also loves his orchids, as you loved the little herbs we used to keep in the window. They grew from your love and care alone; you know I could not keep even the hardiest shrub alive. Perhaps that is why I like him: I see you in his character, and I like you very much. I would take exception to your comment about mutton and donkey rumps but I must concede your point. Perhaps you will take me to supper and educate me about mutton and donkey when the war is over.

Come back to England. Come back to England, and I will go to New Mexico. When you are with me again, I will read to you every night. You will hear my voice so often you will be sick of it. I will read anything to you, even Chandler. Cherish your peace now, for you will have none when you return to me.

I miss Anne Lenner. I find I cannot listen to her anymore. Her music reminds me too much of days gone by, times we shall never have again. Perhaps one day we will lie on the floor of the flat and lose ourselves in jazz again, but even then it will not be the same. We will no longer exist in a world that has not done us violence.

New Year's Eve 1937…Can you believe that was only seven years ago? We are men now rather than the boys we once were. To tell you the truth, I don't remember much of that night. Too much champagne. But I remember Raven and Sean dancing in the kitchen, and I remember Alex insisting on playing that dreadful Leadbelly song over and over. Toward the end of the night, we went to the little balcony and I think I said something extremely soppy. I hope you did not hear it over the fireworks and music. Is that what you remember about that night? I pray you only remember how lovely and brilliant and funny I was.

It is true that I was never much fond of radio plays before we lived together, but they are now inextricably tied into my memories with you. Seldom did we spend a weekend without listening to one or two in the lazy hours before bed. Over time, the medium grew on me; I had my favourites, too, if you will recall. But it is different listening to them without you. Even when they come on over the wireless, I will often turn them off. It is for the same reason that I have put away that painting of the Seine that used to hang in our room: it reminds me too much of you.

Of course I am jealous! How could I not be? Here I sit in Oxford, thousands of miles from you, and there are people right now who are basking in your presence. I do not care if they have romantic designs on you or not, I am jealous of anyone who enters your sphere, who is allowed to spend even a handful of seconds at your side, attending to your voice, absorbing your beauty. I can say these kinds of things when you are far away. You would never permit me to be so blunt if you were here to stop me. I suppose that is one of the very few things about our separation for which I am grateful. Though my affection for you wanes when I am called dull and insufferable in turn. You must write two compliments in your next letter to compensate for this grievous injury you have dealt me. Or promise me you will treat me the next time we go out to Simpson’s.

I have the new scarf in my lap now as I write this. I know I should set it aside to avoid getting ink on it, but I can’t help but keep it close. When I press my nose to it, I imagine I can smell you there, familiar and beloved as ever. I picture your hands crafting it, quick and meticulous. I see your expression, fixed in concentration, that crease between your brows you wear when you are entirely focused on the task at hand. I ache to think of you spending your precious hours of leisure after work labouring over this scarf for me. I ache to think of you thinking of me.

Please tell Mrs Duffield congratulations for me.

No, I don’t think you can convince me to return to school for anything right now, let alone for physics. As you said, there is a feeling on the air that we must carry on with real life despite the constant threat of bombs and invasion. There is a feeling that we must as a necessity move forward, and to return to school would be to go back. Of course, my feelings on the matter may change in the future when the war is over (God willing). Ask me again in a year.

Knight to C3. King’s yours.
C.

[11 February 1944]
To Doctor Charles F. Xavier,
c/o University of Oxford Department of Biochemistry,

I should not laugh at your distress, probably, but your letter left me in such an uncommonly good mood that even two or three of the munitions experts, who I do not come in very regular contact with, mentioned it to me with concern. C., you always lose your head over the littlest things. Forget me? All to the better, so I can horrify and delight you with my habits as you re-discover them. Besides I’m sure you’re being over-dramatic as usual. You seem to have no problems remembering the small details of a night now eight years past, certainly. In every one of your letters there is evidence that you have taken pains to memorise our time together with the same zeal you memorised the name of every protein and enzyme in university, and which you still mumble in your sleep sometimes. You forget whether you’ve filled out your ration card but not, apparently, what I was wearing for that first drink.

I don’t have the same fears, but perhaps it is easier for me to conjure you because you are in the same place doing the same things. I glance at my watch more often than is strictly necessary, and I think—ah, it is four o’clock in Britain, C. will be teaching his junior class. He will be rumpled from the day. Perhaps he will be late, having lost himself in his office reading the new journals or chatting with Ford about butterfly genes again or with his new boy McCain or whoever. It is Tuesday, so he will be wearing the blue suit Raven pieced and sewed for him, with the sleeve sewn on inside out that he promises no one ever notices. If he isn’t late, he will make light talk with his students. He will pay particular attention to those with family at the front or in London or wherever has last borne the brunt of the Luftwaffe’s rage. He will tell some rambling anecdote about accidentally riding the train to Cambridge or running into So and So at the British Restaurant and then smoothly turn it into some genetical metaphor or someother. He will smile like he is telling his students an astounding bit of gossip and speak of Mendel and Darwin as if they were old friends.

Don’t worry about forgetting me. If you are forgetting then I will remind you. And again, until I have so infested your brain that you can never forget. Like an invisible mote clinging to you or a template encoded in your bones.

You’ll forgive me if I struggle to believe that you were ever an unremarkable child. But it does not surprise me that you were a lonely one. You have always been content from the moment I met you to engineer your own happiness, entertainment, and social encounters, like insistently chattering about your research, your fumbling attempts at sailing, and how utterly enchanted you’d been with 'It Happened One Night' and how absolutely certain you were that Frank Capra would be known as the greatest director of our time to someone who was determined to ignore you, until I could no longer pretend to be unaffected.

Maybe that’s why I always hated the events you insisted we attend once a week at least, when I knew you were perfectly capable of enjoying an evening spent curled up in your arm-chair. Or perhaps I’m simply hermetic. Still, I find I almost miss the charm you’d shower upon strangers to secure us generous servings, enviable seats, and a steady chatter of friendly gossip. It was something to just watch you glitter in the world and watch people fall helplessly into your orbit.

I’m sorry about your father

That you struggled to understand your mother growing up did surprise me. You have always seemed to see to the heart of anyone you spoke to long for longer than simple pleasantries. I suppose that with those closest to us, it can go one of two ways: it can be effortless or impossible like it is with no one else. I hope that if you do understand it, it brings you some measure of peace. I hope the knowledge that it is not that you are not worth loving settles into you.

I’m sorry about your father. You know my own parents are

The fascination I have for physics… is similar to what you describe but also dissimilar. I find there are two kinds of motives that cause people to enter physics. If they favour the classical model, it is because rules comfort them. They prefer to imagine that the action of everything is as predictable and clean as a wind up toy. There is no bias in it and few people. This is what drew me to physics in my youth.

You, of course, could have not chosen a discipline more grounded in the person. You have devoted your life to unearthing how human variation is conceived. Why red hair, why innate musical talent, why hetero-chromia. You have always found the world beautiful because you find people beautiful.

The other kind of person drawn to physics becomes a quantum adherent. All of those neat rules, derived, it seemed, from God’s own hand, are occluded by the misty mind of Man. Worse, it is not that we are prevented from seeing an objective universe by the impediment of our humanity. It is that our humanity strips objectivity from the universe. We change reality by simply observing it. We fix reality in place simply by observing it. Our flawed, befuddled minds. What kind of existence is that, that the most basic truths of the world are only figments of our minds?

This kind of physics, of course, is what I decided to devote my own life to. I sympathise with the atoms, I suppose. We have no solid ground beneath our feet either. I suppose you would call me cynical. You have.

It seems strange to me that I have never spoken of this to you before. It was so inimical to my worldview that I forgot that I had not told you about it.

I have unearthed a bottle of drink from somewhere. My nerves feel unsteady, as if typing this out for you was a wound I had not noticed until now. Don’t worry, it’s not the chemists’ brew. Many things are so much harder with you so far away. But you’re right in that some things, like this, are easier, too. I’m glad that I was able to tell you this eventually.

I’m sorry about your father, Charles.

I do not ever think I have been compared to a literary detective before. I think most who look at me see Moriarty and not Holmes.

I will educate you soundly about the difference between donkey and mutton right now: do not eat donkey.

It pains me to think that you have put aside I have a request for you. If you are really so worried about forgetting me—or perhaps merely forgetting my good qualities so that by the time I return you will have forgotten entirely the benefits of my presence—perhaps you ought not to tuck away reminders of me, though they sting. The next time a Lenner song comes on, I ask that you stop and listen until its end and perhaps try to remember what happened after you said those soppy things on New Year’s Eve, 1937.

You have always told me that I am heavy handed with the truth. You did not mean it as a compliment but I have always taken it as one. If you do not wish to be called dull and insufferable you must prune the number of opinions you have about brass vs silver tableware. However, here is your first compliment: When your letters arrive, I retreat to my bare, dusty house and close the windows, for there is always something, some phrase or rhetoric that is uniquely yours, that makes me smile most unbecomingly. I would know your words anywhere. I have never heard the like.

I’m sure you know that Raven has been writing me every few months as well. As a result I am aware of her decision about this particular assignment. I know you will worry about her. I do not presume to be able to stop you, even if I were there. I only ask that you remember to rest, and eat, drink, and, for your heart's sake, try not to work yourself into too much of a state. As unreliable as the post from the States to England is, I can only imagine it will be worse across the lines of war.

In her latest letter, Raven… thoughtfully reminded me that unlike at Oxford, there is no one here who can report to you my displays of sentiment my overt infatua my actions. I have always been of the opinion that, as with Aesop’s soldiers encountering the robber, actions speak louder than words; but apart, words are all we have. So I will tell you that I detest the cat book. And I will tell you that I have read it more times even than 'The Little Prince', slowly, a word at a time, turning each sentence over in my head, trying to imagine it in your voice, different ways, until it sounds right, until it sounds like you.

Here is your second compliment: even the unique arrangement of your words pales in comparison to your voice. I miss it.

Please do not spend so much time with your nose buried in the scarf that you forget to actually wear it.

And peace? With you? Ha. As if I have ever known peace under your roof.

Knight to F6.

E. Lehnsherr

[22 February 1944]
[ADDRESS REDACTED]
To Doctor Erik M. Lehnsherr,

How is it that you can make me smile by calling me over-dramatic and, in essence, as silly as one can be? In reading your admonishments, I hear your voice as clearly as if you were standing here beside me, providing candid commentary on my every decision. I miss that. Sometimes when I worry over-much, or when I start to meddle beyond my bounds, you speak in my ear: No, C., don’t be ridiculous, of course that cannot come to pass, the possibility of such a misfortune would be one in a million, too vanishingly rare to be of consequence. Or: C., do refrain from poking your nose where you don’t belong, I am not around now to make excuses on your behalf and haul you out of trouble, and if you offend someone horribly, it is on your head and your head alone.

In any case, I suppose I do remember more of you than I let on, and perhaps I am premature in my concerns about losing sight of you. Even so, I look forward to re-discovering all your habits, even your most horrible ones. Now as I go about my day, I will imagine you imagining me, minute by minute. Please know that such thoughts will make me smile.

(His name is McCoy, by the way. But I think you knew that.)

Thank you for your kind words about my relationship with my mother. It was always difficult between us, and her passing only served to make the strangeness of our acquaintance even starker. Isn't it funny, to call your mother your acquaintance? Yet that was the shallowness with which I knew her.

Don't feel the need to waste any more ink on consoling me about my mother. Time and maturity have dulled any pain she may have caused me, and I find myself thinking of her these days with only a gentle longing for what might have been.

Do I give off a lonely air? I cannot pretend that your observation does not wound me, for I have always gone to great lengths to deceive everyone into believing that I have never wanted for company, and that if I am ever alone, it is only because I wish to be. I can only hope that others do not see me as clearly as you do; you have always been the most astute man I have ever met, though you like to pretend that you are ignorant to what goes on around you. From the moment we met, you have always been able to see through my pretences. Sometimes I marvel at that. You see, it is my pretences that I believe to be lovable. It is the charm I wear, the affectations I create, that make me alluring and interesting. I have devoted a great deal of my life to becoming someone very intriguing and charming and witty, and you can't imagine how disconcerting it was to meet you for the first time and to realise that you knew I was not that person. And yet you liked me anyway. Oh, you pretended you did not, but you did. When you watched me glitter in the world, was it admiration you felt for my natural glamour? Or was it admiration for how well I played the role, a stage actor in a play of my own making?

Now you will probably frown and call me foolish and shallow for being so self-absorbed. Go on. I smile as I imagine the sound of your scoff, the disdainful roll of your eyes as you tell me I am being self-centred and overly indulgent. When you see me again, tell me I should not think so highly of myself. Tell me I should not pretend to be humble when my ego is more definitive a landmark than Big Ben (Raven's words). I anticipate your scoldings as eagerly as I anticipate your kisses.

I have not thought of my father in some time. I feel his absence constantly but in the same way that I feel my own breathing: it is all subconscious until a thought sharpens my awareness of it. Thank you for your sympathy. I like to think that I have grown into a man of whom he might be proud.

My dear physicist, it seems to me that your field has re-invented philosophical idealism. No wonder you’re such a gloomy lot. Perhaps reading some Bertrand Russell will cheer you up. Did you ever study any Avicenna between your long nights poring over maths and your longer nights poring over chemistry? He proposed that if a man fell freely through the air, feeling nothing as the wind was always constant on his skin, hearing nothing but the same wind, seeing and feeling and tasting nothing, he would still know that he exists. The numbers may not work out, but the world still ticks on, my dear.

To put it another way: There may be no solid ground for the body to stand on, but certainly there are truths of the soul. Or perhaps you might say—probabilities, near certainties, asymptotes of the soul. So close to truth so as to be indistinguishable. You are a truth to me. I hope I am a truth told by your heart as well.

Frank Capra is the greatest director of our time. I firmly believe that his best works are yet to come, if fate is kind enough to allow us to one day arrive again in a world where we have the leisure to make and celebrate film. One day I will convince you of his merits, and you will regret ever having doubted me.



Please excuse the sudden decline in quality of my script. I started this letter some days ago and am now just finishing it on my way to Birmingham. The train is quite cramped, and I am sitting at an odd angle so that the overly inquisitive Frenchman sharing a bench with me cannot read over my shoulder. I think he is under the impression that I speak French; he has tried twice without success to engage with me about the uncommonly pleasant weather we’ve had of late in Oxford—or perhaps he was asking me if I thought it would rain? I could not quite make out his questions, you know my French is atrocious. Hopefully my vacant smiles have convinced him of my French illiteracy and he will allow me to finish this letter in peace.

(You must teach me how to say, 'Sadly I am clueless,' in French when I see you again. Oh how I long to hear you whisper French in my ear like you used to enjoy doing, knowing I understood not a word.)

I could not help but be amused by your implication that unlike me, you find the world to be a singularly dreadful place filled with all manner of degenerates. You like to play at being a misanthrope, and perhaps you have thoroughly convinced yourself that it is who you are, but the truth is, you love this world as much as I do, if not more. Your aversion to others is not a natural inclination to reclusivity; no, it is a reflection of disappointed dreams, of unfulfilled hopes for a better, fairer world. It is not I who believes in the better natures of Man, it is you. I find existence fascinating because of how people are. You find yourself discontent with the world and all its inhabitants because of how you know they could be. Those who would label you as Moriarty must have only a passing idea of who you are.

I knew you would despise the cat book. When you come back, I will read it to you so you can offer up your acerbic commentary page by page. You can tell me all about how irritating you find playful Jenny, and how Pickles is dull and undeserving of his name 'the Fire Cat'! There are no great philosophies, no contemplation of existence, no intriguing formulas with which to occupy your questing mind. There is only an endearing little cat telling stories with morals for children, but isn't that rather charming in its own way? Sometimes it is not philosophy we need; sometimes it is a little cat teaching her friends to dance. You understand, don't you?

I must horrify you now by admitting that I wish I could have a haunch of donkey. It would be a great deal more interesting than the endless parade of plain stew. Mrs Davies and I have been sharing rations when we are able, but everything runs thin. My palate is not the most refined, as you well know, but if I am forced to eat another Woolton pie, I think I may go mad. God, I pray for donkey.

(There is a joke in here about ass, but I am too tired to suss it out. Please imagine that I have said something very clever and dirty.)

(The Frenchman is snoring quite loudly beside me. You will forgive me if I ramble more egregiously than usual.)

Erik Lehnsherr, drinking alone? Darling, take care not to become me.

Your compliments are well-received. I shall be thinking of them for some time. Please know you could never miss my voice half as much as I miss yours. The day I hear you say my name again will be the happiest of my life. It may please you to know that I’ve done as you asked. The painting of the Seine remains, for now, wrapped and put away, but yesterday I turned on the wireless and was greeted by 'Lovely to Look At.' Instead of switching it off, as I was wont to do, I stood in the kitchen and listened until the song was finished. To my surprise, I was filled with a warm joy rather than the sadness I had been expecting. Perhaps you are right and I have been depriving myself of these moments of quiet delight for fear of opening myself up to grief. I thought of 1937. I thought of 1940 also. It was strange to begin this year without you. Let not another New Year’s go by without you by my side.

I shall save my lecture about brass vs silver tableware for a night when you have come home to me and are very tired and cross and want nothing more than to go to bed in silence. Then I will lie next to you and impress upon you how important it is that cheap tableware be distinguished from proper utensils, and you will call me dull and insufferable and wonder why you ever came back to Oxford. Then when you say so, I will endeavour to remind you, with mouth and hands (and more, if you are good). I trust you can imagine what I mean.

It seems mildly inappropriate to transition from that to discussing my sister, so I will encourage you to rest your eyes for a moment until such a time that you might return to this letter with fresh innocence.

I think Raven writes you more often than she does me; she is wary that I will beg her to come home, though I know her work is vital. My nights have been sleepless since she informed me of her most recent assignment. She of course did not provide details, but I have my suspicions. I thank God that you are safe in the States. I would not have the energy to fret over the both of you.

I have some news for you. I saved it for the end because I have been mulling it over for days. Last week I received a letter from a most unexpected source. It was addressed to you from a Magda Eisenhardt. I puzzled over this for a while before I remembered that you once knew a girl named Magda back in Germany. I don't think her name was Eisenhardt, or perhaps you never mentioned a surname. I do remember that you mentioned she was very dear to you once, which stuck out to me because you have very few people in your life whom you would admit to holding dear. I wrote her back immediately with your current postal address. I hope you do not mind. It cheers me to know that you have another friend out there in the world! You allow yourself too few. I think she may be near to you, too; her return address was in Delaware. Is that near to you? I have always been rubbish at geography. In any case, she is nearer to you than I, so perhaps she can give you the hug I so desperately long to share with you. Please let me know if she writes. It would make me oh so happy.

And now, some marvellous news to end a somewhat melancholy letter: pawn capture on C5. First blood is mine, my dear. Well, it's marvellous news for me, anyway!

Yours,
C.

[15 March 1944]
To Doctor Charles F. Xavier,
c/o University of Oxford Department of Biochemistry,

Magda and I

When I received Magda's letter

Everyone is busy here. Several prototypes have arrived, as have the initial samples of █████ for laboratory use. They are beginning tests, as all that is missing is the key mechanism. It seems every day there is a breakthrough or a disappointment. The weather follows; it is hot one moment then bitter the next. I am sorry I have not had time to write you much. I fall into bed drunk with exhaustion each evening. And I admit that I’ve been troubled and have struggled to know what to say to you.

Charles, do you remember that I told you about Magda Gurzsky? She was a Sinti girl a year older than me. Her father ran a cinema when we were young but when the first war came he had to go out of business as people suspected him and his kind of being spies. They stayed in Berlin a while longer, but when I was 17 it finally became untenable and they moved away. I lost track of her. You will recall her as my first love.

I did receive a letter from Miss Eisenhardt soon after your own letter arrived. In it she explained that Eisenhardt was a name she had adopted. Your Magda Eisenhardt is actually Magda Gurzsky of Berlin. It occurred that she too was fortunate enough to leave before the Nazis took power, not to study, as I did, but as an aid worker. As you said, she is also in the United States now. As petitioning to leave the project site is an enormous amount of work, I was glad she could travel to meet me in Santa Fe. I wish you had been there with me to tether me to reality; the strangeness of having spoken to Magda Gurzsky only days ago still comes over me at odd moments, startling me out of contemplation of spontaneous fission.

Is that strange? You say that you rely on me to keep your thoughts from flying away from you, but I do the same. I think you have ruined me; I no longer know how to integrate the parts of my life without you. Your absence is a kind of mass spectrometry, neatly separating the parts of myself. E. the boy who lived in Berlin here, E. the physicist there, the E. I have been accustomed to being, the integration of many parts, absent entirely. How did you do that? How do I learn to be one person without you?

You are foolish and shallow for being so self-absorbed, but it takes all the fun out of saying so when you pre-empt me. It’s a compliment, C.—a third compliment at that, which means that you owe one to me—to say that you maintain a core of yourself in spite of how many social graces and airs you swap out like masks, and even those are less like masks and more like a prism diffracting light into separate colours. It could be so easy for you to disappear into your facades entirely, but when we are alone I can see them falling from you like you are undressing, and beneath them, unchanged, is my C. You are still intriguing and witty—perhaps not charming, but as you say, I am invulnerable to charm—and even better, you are real. My mother would say that a hen in the hand is better than an eagle in the sky. The older I get, the wiser she seems to me.

This person you have become is also entirely your own, so I will say no more about your parents. However, I cannot imagine that any reasonable person could find any fault with who you have become.

It's not idealism, you biochemical twit, it's a bridge between idealism and materialism that favours the mind. Please do not answer the existential problems of physics with philosophy; the mathematics of philosophy are infamously inaccurate. When you can weigh a soul or separate it into its composite parts with a calutron then I will cheer up about the observer effect, not before!

What I feel for you is expressible in numbers, if only we could find them. That makes it no less enormous and important. I think sometimes I look for numbers to describe it so that you may fully understand how enormous and important it is.

I was startled by your reference to Birmingham until I remembered it was March, and the university there has contracted you for a lecture series about genetics. Has it been a year since they extended their invitation to you? Last March I remember you wondering idly if the Department of Physics could do with a visiting researcher. I never told you that though I scoffed then I toyed with the idea; Birmingham is certainly more interested in the latest physics discoveries than Oxford. Strange that we had not then ever been apart for more than a few weeks at a time.

You know, C., that I could never teach you French, not even the simplest phrases. The consonants simply escape you. I suppose you will have to resign yourself to being set upon by fellow travellers who spy a certain French sensibility about you. It’s all to the good for me; you remain, as ever, absurdly easy to please. All I must do is ask for the fish meal in some other language and you melt.

I fear you have conditioned me to find your ridiculous taste in film and reading pleasant. There is obviously no cinema here, but I found myself defending that Mr Smith movie to one of the military officers the other day. Your maudlin music, your long diatribes about Capra’s sense of optimism and spirit, even the cat book. When they are mentioned or glimpsed, I think of you, and that reward erodes my principled dislike of these things. Who will you argue with when I return and you find that I too see Capra’s saccharine Americanism as extraordinary and praiseworthy?

I do understand. Yes; the cat is sweet. I wanted a cat when I was small. I have not thought about that for a long time; probably the past returning has brought it back to the surface.

There are worse things than being C. Xavier. I’m glad the music brought you some joy.

There are no lecture series here, nor spying Frenchmen. One of the other physicists rousted me out of bed to try ski-ing. It’s horrible. I know you cannot visit. Even if you were to make the journey across the Atlantic, non-residents are not permitted on the premises. Still, even if sunrises are out of the question, there is so much here that is beautiful. You would have the words for it in the way that I don’t. If it were you here and me in small, grey Oxford, you could describe it to me so well that I could see it too. It seems unfair that it is only me and there is no way to make you understand how blue the sky is in equations. The snow, the sun, and the sky. Perhaps one day I could return here with you by my side, or somewhere like it. I think the beauty of it would either shut you up at last or you would find words I could never imagine for it.

What else? Mrs Bier has shown me a new fried egg dish. Rest assured that if it ever comes to it I will have better things to feed you with than donkey.

My meeting with Magda was several days ago. I still had an escort, but only two of the WAAC women, and they spent the drive there making pointed comments about the 'lady friend' I was to meet. It's been a source of great gossip around the base, these letters that I write so faithfully and guard so jealously, and I suspect it is taken for granted that I write them to a lover, and this was who I was meeting. Isn’t that amusing?

We spoke for so long we were summarily kicked out of the coffee-house and resettled on a park bench. We talked in English, of course—German is greeted with suspicion these days, and though we taught each other a little of our household languages, it has been a long time, and I barely remember any Romani, and she even less Yiddish. I don't even remember what we talked about. Family, probably, when we saw them last, what we fear has befallen them. How everyone we knew is a Nazi or dead now. I wanted so to tell her what I was doing, that I was fighting for our home in my own way. I wanted to tell her little Lilli had made it out and was here with me. But I could say none of these things in public, to a person I had not seen in over a decade.

I had to return to the compound that night, as my pass was only good for the day, and we parted reluctantly. She must return to Delaware where her family resides and I to work. I write this now to you four days later and it feels like a dream. Magda says I have not changed much in her estimation, but I feel like a different person entirely from the E. who held her hand. I wish you had known me as a child. You would be able to give me a clear eyed estimation of whether I am as different as I feel.

If being here among other practitioners of the Judische Physik for the first time in many years was strange, it was stranger still to hear from Magda. It is easy to think of everything before Oxford as another world entirely, as unreachable to me and materially insubstantial as Jupiter. I cannot return to Dusseldorf where I was born or Berlin where I grew up. I cannot see my parents or Ruth or my niece. Suddenly the vault door between me and the world before 1932 has opened and disgorged Magda. I do not know what I feel, and I wish you were here. You have always been able to turn my muddled feelings into clear understanding. It is why I put up even with your machinations to pounce on me with tableware talk.

I will ask Raven to write more, and advise her to simply leave your letters unopened if they are so full of hennish nagging.

Bishop takes pawn on C5; don't gloat so much, it doesn't become you. And king’s yours,
E. Lehnsherr

[31 March 1944]
[ADDRESS REDACTED]
To Doctor Erik M. Lehnsherr,

First, the most important news: the queerest thing happened last week, the day after I returned from Birmingham. I was re-reading your last letter, as I often do when I am missing you, and almost as soon as I finished, I remembered I had left the brolly on the stoop to dry earlier in the day. I went to fetch it and heard a most pitiful noise, a weak little squeak that I thought at first was a drowned rat, perhaps a victim of the day's rains. Drowned or not, it continued to squeak and complain so I figured it must not be on the brink of death if it were still able to raise some racket. I poked around in the bushes for some time and nearly gave up, and when I finally got on my hands and knees, I discovered the culprit huddled under the old rose bush. It was a little cat! The smallest, most bedraggled cat you could imagine, as dirty as if it had crawled straight out from the Isis. She is full grown, I think, but still quite petite, and she has a temper; she gave me a ferocious swat when I attempted to wash the filth of the river rains from her, and I am still having trouble holding this pen properly with my poor bandaged fingers.

In any case, I went back and forth about whether or not to keep her, or if I should return her to the streets where she is clearly comfortable, but I fear for her safety in the cold and wet, and besides, there are packs of stray dogs out and about who would probably consider her a step up from their usual Woolton pie. I thought too of your last letter, and how you used to want a cat when you were a boy. This seemed too fated an encounter to ignore.

Anyway, her name is Jenny for now (I am working on being more original, though it is hard to find a name that seems to suit her) and she hates me. I shall endeavour to tame her before you come home, or else you may return to a cat and nothing more, as I will have been sliced to ribbons by her fierce claws. She likes tuna. I am winning her over bit by bit, I think. I hope my body will soon decide that a little cat is no threat at all and give up on inflicting uncontrollable sneezing and coughing and running noses on me. Until then, I live in misery, and Jenny lives in yowling ferocity.

I have included a poorly rendered drawing of her. I may try to unearth Raven's old photography equipment to send a proper photograph with my next letter.

I am sorry your work proceeds in fits and starts. Please remember that you will be useless to the project if you cannot function, so you must take care of yourself at least half as well as you take care of your plants. What has been troubling you, darling? Is it the work? You know I am here to listen if you wish to tell me. I don’t know how much is forbidden by the censors but I would offer you advice if I could, even if you often scoff at my suggestions. Please know that you can say anything to me, always.

I suspected and hoped that Magda Eisenhardt and your Magda were one and the same! You cannot know how excited I am to hear this news. I am so relieved she made it out of Germany. Though you have never said too much about her, I know her fate weighed on you heavily. Now that you know she is safe and well, I hope you rest a little more easily. I wish I had been there also, if only to meet your Magda. What would you tell her about me, I wonder? I swear, I am not begging for compliments again (you know I have been shameless about doing so, and would be again).

I wish I had known you as a child as well, if only because I always feel as if I will never have enough time with you. I try to imagine you at 12, a boy on the tender cusp of adolescence. (You did mention that you met her at 12, if I remember correctly?) I can picture you as a boy exactly as you are now: serious and stern and clever, and underneath that, funny and warm and kind. I imagine that is what drew Magda to you when you were children. She must see that in you still if she says you have not changed much. Is she the same now as she was then, your Magda? I try to imagine the kind of girl who could have caught your attention then: beautiful, sweet, intelligent, witty. I know almost nothing about her aside from what you’ve told me, but I know she must be a good estimator of character if she likes you. Of course you are both grown now, and you are years out from being children, but I imagine the essence of you remains the same.

I can do nothing but speculate on your feelings, obviously, but let me try: You are troubled by Magda’s sudden arrival because she reminds you of a time you had lost. You are pleased to see her alive and well, but she represents a more innocent era to which you no longer belong. In seeing her, you see your parents, Ruth, your niece, and you cannot be happy, not entirely. But you ought to be unreservedly happy to see Magda again, you think, so it confuses and upsets you.

Am I close? If I am, let me reassure you that there is nothing wrong with being happy to see her again, and it is not a betrayal of your family to embrace this piece of your past without bitterness, sadness, or regret.

Will you see her again, do you think?

Thank you for the third compliment; I cherish it as I cherish the others. You are too sweet on me. I find it difficult sometimes to read your words directly. I must turn away and read them from the corner of my eye so as not to let them overcome me. Years ago when we were first tentatively dancing around each other, I struggled sometimes with the overwhelming intensity of my feelings for you. It seemed that though the briefest glance from you could render me speechless and helpless for minutes at a time, you had the curious ability to remain utterly immune to my charms. I flirted and flattered and laid it on thick, but it was hopeless: the depths of your feelings could never match the bottomless ocean of mine. This is not a slight on your capacity for love, my dear, only a reflection of my own insecurity. Over the years, I have learned you better, and I know now that you show your love in different ways, that I only needed to let my eyes fall out of focus and turn my head to see you clearly, like an optical illusion that, when viewed from a certain angle, resolves into a coherent, understandable picture.

I no longer believe that anything between us is unrequited. Far from it. Still, say it again, that I have ruined you. I am not so proud that I will not admit that I sighed and fluttered like a blushing maiden when I read those words. I could never object to hearing again how deeply I have affected you. I feel the same way, you know; I am not a whole man without you by my side. I am a shadow, awaiting the return of the body to which I belong. When you come back, I shall reattach myself to you and mirror your every movement, laugh when you laugh, breathe when you breathe. You will not be rid of me again so soon.

What I feel for you can be summed up by one number: 208. It is the number of days since I have seen your face, heard your voice, felt your hand in mine. Every day I wake up to find the number increased yet again, and am amazed by the fact that I have somehow lived another day without you. One day, that number will be 0, but not soon enough. Never soon enough.

Here is my compliment to you: you are the most loving man I have ever known. You pretend to have no heart, but yours is open always, to everyone. Though people are quick to lose your favour, once they earn it, it is earned forever. You have no patience for liars, thieves, bigots, politicians, but for those you love, you have all the patience in the world. Somehow you allowed me under your defences and into your heart. I strive every day to be worthy of my place there. Your mother was right, but you are the eagle in my hand, reality and dream in one. I hold you close, frightened of the day you grow restless and spread your wings to leave me.

I am laying down my pen for the day. Against my better judgment, I will not strike out that last line. I have been honest in these letters so far; I believe I owe you at least that much.


I am back an evening later, slightly less than fully conscious, thanks to Mrs Davies. She brought over a sherry. I have no idea how she is getting her hands on liquor like this. I think she may be fermenting something of her own in her cellar. If I go blind by to-morrow, know that it was Mrs Davies and her bloody sherry. Please cook for me every day when you return. I am growing fond indeed of Mrs Davies but she only knows three or four recipes and how to obtain alcohol stronger than a horse’s kick. I think we may both cry if you present us with your new fried egg dish.

The lecture series went well, I think. There were fewer students there than when I last gave a lecture five years ago, when I had just graduated and been invited to speak. Do you remember how nervous I was then? The night before, we stayed at the hotel down the street from the university, and I practised my lecture on you probably a dozen times before you threatened to tear up my notes unless I went to bed. The next day, I was practically shaking at the lectern. I looked up and there you were in the front row, dressed in your best suit, handsome as the devil. You didn’t give a damn about my lecture or anyone else’s, I imagine you were bored to tears, but you stayed, and you took me to supper after at that dreadful Italian place where I am certain I saw a rat. Then we went back to the hotel, and you remember the rest, I hope.

Those memories were impossible to avoid last week in Birmingham. I was not so nervous this time round, but I still looked for you in the front row. After, I went out to supper with some of the students and the professors. Antoni Symanski was there. I don’t know if you remember him. He was two years older than us at Oxford, and he ran one of the labs I was invited to work in. I hadn’t seen him since he graduated and left, but apparently he teaches at Birmingham now. He looks much older than I remember. The years have not been kind to him. He has a sad story: he married some months after he left Oxford, and they moved to Birmingham to be closer to her family. She became pregnant soon after but did not survive the birth. Luckily the babe did well; Symanski now has a healthy young son. Yet I could see in his face that he still feels the loss of his wife keenly. I felt deeply sorry for him.

He asked me if I had married. I told him no. He asked if I had a sweetheart, and I could not bring myself to lie, though I know you might take exception to being called 'my sweetheart.' He kindly didn’t press for details when I offered none. He is a sensitive soul and knows when to let questions go unasked.

Oh E., I do feel so sorry for him. Let’s have him and his son around in Oxford when you are home and we are ready to have visitors again. I’ll be on my best behaviour, I promise. I won’t even say a word about proper tableware.

French is an incoherent language. There, I have said it. I have no idea how you and Raven managed to learn it. The only reason I wish I knew it better is because I wish I understood when you and Raven prattle on in French and then look at me and laugh. Perhaps it is better to be spared your insults. I will leave French to the two of you and attempt to devise some creative jibes in Latin for when you return.

You defended the Mr Smith movie? The one you called unimaginative, juvenile, and derivative? Oh, how I wish I had been there to hear that! And don’t pretend you don’t enjoy my maudlin music—you never object when I put it on, and I have seen you swaying to it from time to time when the beat moves you. I am glad that in my absence, you are learning to appreciate Capra in all his genius, and the cat book in all its genius! Others may stockpile beans and water, but I am stockpiling books and films with which to horrify you when you come home. Perhaps you will be so changed when you return that you will genuinely enjoy my collection, which will surely be an unpleasant shock for you and a great delight for me.

You know I never nag hennishly. At least say I nag cockishly.

One day perhaps I will take you skiing in Switzerland. When I was a boy, my parents used to take us there in the summers, and I have fond memories of the snow. I smile when I think of you, so graceful and athletic, flailing about on a pair of skis. Shall we go for my amusement? Or shall we stay in the chalet every day, cosied up by the fire, drinking hot chocolate and keeping each other warm?

Or, when the war is over, we can go back to New Mexico and you can show me everything you have seen while we were apart. I would like to see the world through your eyes, to bear witness to the place you called home away from our home. I don’t know if the blueness of the sky or the brightness of the sun could shut me up, but you could. Nothing has ever rendered me so breathless as the way you frown when you are confronted with a particularly stubborn equation. Or the way your hands curl around my favourite mug when you bring me tea.

I miss you, I miss you, I miss you.

I must bring this letter to a conclusion as Jenny is savaging my ankles. Pawn to A3, and yours in sniffles,
C.

P.S. Should we name her after a physicist? Wouldn't it be funny to name her Schroedinger? She has the peculiar habit of being here one moment and gone the next. She will be sitting at my feet, and then I will look down and she will have disappeared into a pocket dimension, and no amount of peering under cupboards and beds will reveal her. Then, when I have mourned her loss, she will appear again, meowing grumpily and clawing my chair. Is that not Schroedinger-esque? Consider it. Or perhaps not, given the fact that you hate all the premier physicists of our time. Perhaps we will stick with Jenny for now, until such a time comes when you encounter a Jenny you cannot stand, and then we shall be forced to rechristen her Pickles.

[9 April 1944]
To Doctor Charles F. Xavier,
c/o University of Oxford Department of Biochemistry,

Charles, you

I see you have purchased new stationary. As I am not there to rein you in, I have typed this letter on the back of a bond pamphlet to balance out the scales.

If only all your other impulses could be so easily struck out. You mentioned Schroedinger’s wretched thought experiment in your letter, and though that particular paper is rife in false equivalencies, I should like to inhabit the world it describes for a moment, so that I may return home and find that there was no cat after all. It was only a quirk of atoms, perhaps a slight misalignment of an electron in your brain, that caused a vivid and persistent hallucination. Alas, I suspect that whatever is mis-wired in your brain is much more intractable than a stray particle. You have successfully convinced me that I may never leave you alone again, no matter what existential threat is shaking our world.

Is this the reason, then, that we were never apart for very long in the years of our association? If I should ever be absent for a few months to sort out an estate or to pursue a visiting professorship, will I return to find that you have purchased us a house, or put my name up for the city council, or adopted two or six war orphans? Why am I surprised? I knew that this posting would require sacrifices and that however long I was away in New Mexico, you would certainly make me regret leaving you on your own recognisance at least once a season. From the moment you mentioned a squeaking, I read on with the greatest dread, because you are correct. I know you so well. Your habit of taking in strays is legendary around campus. 'Look pitiful in front of Professor Xavier,' wise MCRs tell their hapless juniors. 'He’ll make sure you’re looked after.' Though none of the miserable hungry students you have ever let sleep in your office or come over for supper have ever bitten you, as far as I know. Perhaps they have.

Is it too much to

Don’t you realise yet that



I went to go watch some of the gun testing, and I’m calmer now, though still despairing. C., I know that your first impulse in every situation is to give people, especially those you love are close to, whatever they want, no matter how fleeting or reckless the desire is. To be unsparing about it, it is because you worry that people will stop caring about you if you are not always making them happy. More kindly, it is because you like making them smile. It is your grand ambition. But C., I remind you again that not every wish needs or ought to be granted, especially when the cost of it is a great deal of inconvenience and your health.

However, saying this, I also know that when you have attached yourself to something, you will claw through fire and death to hang onto it. I can’t exactly complain, given where it’s gotten me. So I have, over the last few hours, resigned myself to now being in co-possession of a cat. Please, though. No more surprises, no matter how cheerful. I cannot spend my days worrying that you have somehow acquired an elephant because I carelessly let slip how much I loved the ones at the Berlin zoo.

I knew I should have clipped those rose bushes long ago.

Please change your bandages often. I know that in the time it took for your letter to make its way across the Atlantic, it may be too late to keep you from contracting a fatal infection from the plasters you forget to remove until they fall off on their own authority, but I will remind you all the same. Also because I know that short of a visit to hospital nothing will convince you to give up the creature, I hope you will look into those anti-histamine tablets at the chemist’s. I have written to Dr Swineford at the one of the Virginia universities. He has some specialty clinic there to research the emerging field of allergies. I don’t pretend to understand his science as you are the biologist, but several of the lab assistants here with ties to the medical and biological professions have cited him as the authority. I will also write to Mrs Davies and Prof Peters to ask them to make sure you have taken any medication you require at the appropriate time. I know you’ll fuss about 'bothering' Peters, but he was fond of you as a student, and surely he’ll enjoy the opportunity to abandon his duties as chair of biochemistry to administer some correction to an old pupil.

Please take care of yourself. I cannot think about criticality calculations when I am worrying over you.

Now to address your frankly unnecessary concerns for my welfare. (I wonder if you get into such predicaments because you are not using the teacupful of sense which God gave you to keep track of yourself but rather have diverted some to worry after me.) I’m fine except sometimes I am slow to rise and I can’t account for it. You know that I've always been able to sleep and rise with ease, so these mornings spent looking at the light coming through the small window and reminiscing are strange. It is probably only because I so recently saw Magda, who was with me during the times I think of. Or perhaps it is from missing you; my loneliness has finally reached criticality and your absence has made its way out of my dreams and into the waking world. However, you need not fear for the project. I like to think that even when I am half myself, I am twice the asset of some of the others here.

I think you have I think you are right about Magda, or rather what seeing her again stirred in me. I know you are only trying to make me frown when you tell me my mind sticks when I try to feel two things at once, but there’s some truth to it. I have missed her. I have wished her out of harm’s way, and am I relieved to have proof of it. I also feel more keenly than ever that so few of the people I care for are the same. And you are right in that this much longed-after 'safety' is less of a reassurance than a yoke of guilt. They tell us that no one will leave this war unscathed. If Magda is not who it will take from me, who is? And if by some spectacular coincidence I do not lose anyone dear to me, why is it me who receives that blessing?

It is claustrophobic here, fighting in a war without ever seeing blood. I wish this weapon had been a thing of bio-chemistry and you could be here, safe, and me in Oxford. I’d sleep in your office to be closer to the shelters.

I wish my family had come with me when I left, as Magda’s did.

When I lie in bed before I’m fully awake, what I remember is the last war. I don’t remember anything before it began and I don’t remember it beginning. The Dusseldorf of my earliest memories has all the copper roofs missing for the munitions factories and is so cold and so lean. You have wondered why I cannot stomach a Woolton pie, and it’s because the winter before the end of the war there was nothing but turnips and bread, and sometimes not even that. There were air ships docked close to the city and sometimes they would be bombed. I don’t remember the noise, do you recall how startled I was when we heard the sound of a bomb muffled by the shelter walls for the first time? But some nights there was also fire when the zeppelins were hit, and I remember that. We lived in Benrath, which was close, and I can clearly remember crowding near the window watching the air ships burn. It smelled like smoke the morning after.

When it ended I wanted to know what being a soldier was like, and I pestered my father for months. He spoke of it to my mother sometimes, but never to me or Ruth, so the image I had of it came from the zeppelins burning and the one-legged soldiers selling bootlaces and sharing cigarette stumps from the street when we moved to Berlin. I met Magda when I was 10, not 12, and of course we could not imagine another war. Everyone was so wracked with misery from the last one. And it is not twenty-five years and I am trying to find a way to blow up much bigger things than one zeppelin. At that age I could not have pictured myself as the hand dropping bombs over that air yard instead of the spectator watching. You will laugh at this, I’m sure, that I was once so naive. That I could not imagine an evil so great I would not only feel called to fight it, but to muster all my invention and the laws of physics to do battle as well.

Perhaps my family is already gone dead. Perhaps this weapon will save them. Maybe the thing I feel when I see Magda well, empty spaces all around us, is good, if it is the thing that pulls me out of bed and back to work.

She has written me to ask if she might see me again the next time she can leave her job for a time in August. I have already written to agree; whatever I feel surely cannot matter as much as another few hours with someone I thought I had lost.

Thank you for the next part of your letter. It lightened my heart to read after the preceding paragraphs called up such grim thoughts. I am no eagle, C., but I did enjoy the metaphor. I have missed your melodrama. I have no wings; I could not fly away from you. Re-reading that I wince but I will leave this in too. You always take things as I mean them, even if I would not.

I am pleased that you’ve agreed that the human heart is indeed quantifiable. It’s 217 days now at the time of this letter’s writing, and another day before it can be posted since it’s night now. More before it reaches you. Don’t lose the count; we should know how much tenderness I owe you.

Here is another benefit of typing rather than hand writing these letters: it is much easier to conceal a lightly potted quality. When you drink the downward swoop of your Y’s and J’s always become ridiculous. I thought to write Mrs Davies and ask her to restrain herself, but I thought to write Mrs Davies about it but in spite of my worries I am convinced it will not be necessary. In this I trust you. You may not be relied upon to get somewhere punctually or to keep yourself well and warm, but I know that in spite of your best efforts to convince me otherwise, you are far from the C. X. of 1936 and 1937.

I know that sometimes I am overbearing in my concern for you. Ruth would take me to task for it as well, my behaving as if she were not eight years older and far wiser than me. I have re-read this letter and will keep it as it is, as you have done something astoundingly stupid and ought to be shouted at, but I will not attempt to gauge how much you should be drinking from over 7000 kilometres away. Please remember that if you drink yourself to death I will be bereft and do as you see fit. As ever, I place my future happiness in your hands.

I’ll have you know that I paid rapt attention during your lecture… the first three times or so. I can still remember the topic: 'Methods of Purification and Identification of the Transforming Principle in the Griffith Experiment and the Potentially Heritable Qualities of Non-Protein Molecules.' You were young and already controversial, swimming in the pond of some Nobel laureate who’d been researching flies or whatever, never mind that the man himself thought your thesis was promising, if you could only prove it. I certainly remember the swotty little moron who stood up for the first question later and told you, in essence, that you’d wasted your time exploring the possibility instead of attempting to isolate which protein carried heritable information. You were quick and wry and charming and devastating in your answer, and you had the whole room on your side. You never do so well as you do when you are challenged. I was horribly proud, even though I had nothing to do with it, as well as full of other things. I don’t know how I managed to restrain myself throughout the supper. I maintain I never saw a rat, but perhaps that speaks not to the hygiene of the place as much as my distraction. That room, yes. That bath-tub. I remember it fondly, too.

I certainly hope it was the memories of our time there generally, rather than the specific memories of that hotel room and everything that we did inside it, that was on your mind this time. While I think that would certainly be material for a scintillating presentation, perhaps the Birmingham faculty would not agree. (Perhaps they would; people are known to go funny around you when you smile at them.)

I remember Symanski, yes. The one with the unfortunate hairline. We’re all much older than we were eight years ago, but I’m sorry to hear about his wife anyway. It’s strange; Mrs Duffield very skilfully teased me into admitting that my letters are to a lover not three days ago. She used the same word, 'sweetheart.' Reading it in your letter sent a particular thrill through me. I do not know if it is awe that God seemingly commands the universe to rhyme or some other emotional reaction. Once I would have assumed it to be terror, but I play it over in my mind now. You call me many things in light distraction, but not sweetheart so far.

C., if the last several weeks have proven anything, it is that I cannot possibly stop you from taking care of others as much as you please. Do you know anything about the boy? I will see if I can bring him some American trinket or whatever.

Perhaps you can practise your Latin by reading some Catallus to me when I return. It's a pity though that Latin is not sensual to the ear, and another pity you don’t understand French; if you did, you would understand what I mean when I say to you: Je souffre des agonies sur ces lettres. Quand une en arrive, je la lis et la relis, et puis je passe la nuit en écrivant une réponse à toi. Il y a un échiquier dans un coin de mon chambre sur lequel je tiens compte de notre jeu, et quand je décris mon coup prochain dans mes lettres à toi, j’embrasse la pièce que je bouge comme si j’embrassais les bouts de tes doigts. Quand la guerre finira, partons ensemble! Il faut que nous vivrons loin des bombes et loin des regards indiscrets de voisins. Laisse-moi être à ton côté jusqu’au bout de nos jours. Pourquoi est-ce si facile de dire ces choses quand je sais que tu ne peux pas les entendre? Pardonne-moi, pardonne-moi. Je sais que tu attends toujours pour moi de répondre avec ces trois mots magiques. Mais quand j’essaie, ma langue se colle contre le plafond de ma bouche. Pardonne-moi, pardonne-moi. Même maintenant, je ne peux pas les mettre par écrit. Peut-être que tu les reconnaîtras quand-même entre ces lignes que je t’evoie.^{[ Translation. ]}

I hope that the censors don’t take that for code. Feynman over in computation has been censured more than once for ciphering his letters to his wife. If he were not so well liked he certainly would’ve been booted off the project long before now. He rather reminds me of you, actually.

I hope sincerely that whatever this is that has turned my taste in art to something more resembling yours passes soon or I will lose all respect for myself. Who needs schmaltzy music? There is melancholy enough in the world. (I will cede that your taste in Benny Goodman is acceptable. It’s fine music, even if rather over-theatrical.) It annoys me that having read your ludicrous recollections of the beginning of our association I understand better why you like this music. Its melodrama matches yours. Now with distance and longing I see that your films you like to echo your own bull-headed optimism and faith in humanity and your books your scientific imagination. Hopefully the moment I see you I will be cured of this partiality to all the saccharine things you love.

All these fanciful promises about seeing the world… I can say, now further from the place of my birth than I have ever been, that it falls flat of its promise. I want you to see the beauty of this place because I want you here with me, now. I realise now that even as long as we've known each other we've never really gone on holiday beyond excursions to London. Everywhere we've been we only bothered to visit for the sake of our research. I don't mind that. The idea of touring the world after the war ends holds little appeal to me. It's your chipped tea set you have more than enough money to replace but cling to so stubbornly that I miss right now. The blankets draped over the chairs. The kitchen and its pans, the one with the stained wooden handle and the good iron one you're forbidden from touching. The endless grey of the sky. Your feet in my lap. I suppose you could put your feet in my lap just as well in Ceylon or Morocco but what would you do with that much sun? Burn, I expect. And Switzerland is certainly out of the question. Ski-ing is nothing but an invitation to grievous injury. If Man were meant to go that fast, we would be able to run at that speed.

We could leave Oxford though. Go somewhere where genetics is recognised as, how did you put it, the most promising opportunity thus far to empirically define the core precepts of what it is to be human. Perhaps somewhere where the physics division can actually afford a cloud chamber. Cambridge or King's or maybe even somewhere in America. Anglophone; unfortunately nowhere teaches in Latin. Even then I do not think I would feel much called to leave the grounds of whatever town we settled in. There is too much to do in the lab. There are too many sips of tea from a chipped cup to savour.

Do you miss New York the way

If you could live anywhere, where would you choose? After the war ends, anyway. I would follow you, of course.

Do you miss New York the way I miss Berlin sometimes?

Thank you for the drawing of the cat. It is indeed poorly rendered. Leave its name as Jenny; you hate pickled foods.

Speaking of your latest folly, I hardly feel as though I ought to reward you with a chess move. However, I will move my pawn to A6.

E. Lehnsherr

Post-script. Remember to see the chemist about those tablets.
Post-post-script. It is probably past time for you to change your bandages; go do that as well now.