The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (32 page)

‘
Zazous
,’ Clément says. ‘The police round them up and cut their hair. Throw them in jail sometimes. The authorities understand how to deal with political dissent. That’s easy. But these kids aren’t political and that confuses them.’

At the river she pauses and looks. This is where she strolled with him that spring day in 1939 with Ned and her father. The strange contingency of events strikes her: how distant this place is from that summer afternoon. Within the rigid matrix of three dimensions it appears to be the same: there is the Pont Saint-Michel; there the buttresses and towers of Notre Dame, painted gold in the setting sun; ahead the steep roofs of the Palais de Justice. But it is a different place entirely when the fourth
dimension of time is sprung from its shackles. The naive girl in a bright summer frock is there no longer. She no longer walks along the
quai
holding his hand and trying not to skip like a child. She no longer blushes at his compliments. She is a woman now, dressed in grey like the city itself, half a decade and a whole world away. And now she knows that the man beside her was, on that distant summer day, edging his way through the intricacies of nuclear physics towards the possibility of an atomic bomb.

She asks, ‘Why didn’t you leave France in 1940 when the others did, Clément?’

He doesn’t answer immediately, as though surprised by the question. ‘I thought I ought to see things through,’ he says eventually. ‘This is where I belong. Not like Kowarski or von Halban. Not like you. France is all that I have, for better or worse.’

‘I love France too.’

‘It’s nothing to do with love. More mundane than that. More like habit. And something else, a sense of honour, perhaps. Does that sound very pompous?’

‘Rather.’

‘Obligation. Try that. I’m not proud of what’s happened. Almost no one is. But I feel I can’t shrug off responsibility.’

‘And running away to England would be doing that?’

‘Perhaps it would.’

‘Or maybe it would be shouldering responsibility.’

He laughs. ‘You always were a determined arguer, even when you didn’t know what you were talking about.’

They cross the bridge and walk past the Palais de Justice. Swastika banners hang down the front of the building, the colours of sealing wax and boot polish. German soldiers mount guard, apparently indifferent to anyone who passes by; yet still she feels vulnerable, a mouse crossing a field with the hawks hovering overhead. It’s a relief to gain the right bank of the river and find Parisians in the place du Châtelet, crowds in
the cafés, a scattering of theatregoers around the entrance of the theatre, even though there are some grey-green uniforms among the people shuffling in through the doors to the foyer. Posters announce the play –
Les Mouches
. The playwright is the latest sensation in the literary world of the city, a teacher of philosophy who has one novel and a collection of short stories to his name. ‘The novel’s called
La Nausée
,’ Clément tells her, and she laughs. ‘Nausea? Why stop at mere nausea? Why not “vomit”?’ But the idea doesn’t seem very funny, and neither does the play, which turns out to be a reworking of the myth of Orestes and Electra, an astringent mix of ritual and violence in which the protagonist demonstrates his freedom from the gods by committing murder, and the Furies buzz around the cast like flies around a pile of excrement. The strange dynamic of the piece finds echoes in the half-empty streets of the city, in the sudden raids and the meaningless arrests, in the collusion of the inhabitants and the defiance of a few misfits. ‘
Pardonneznous de vivre alors que vous êtes morts
,’ the chorus repeats, and there’s an outcry of approval from some people in the half-empty auditorium. Forgive us for being alive when you are dead.

They get back to the flat by nine, having argued about the play on the way back. It was about the occupation and the resistance. It wasn’t. It showed how the French people should strive towards the condition of freedom. It showed only how violence could be seen to be heroic. ‘And the sets!’ she cries, amid laughter. ‘And those ridiculous masks!’

Marie has left food for them in the kitchen. They are like students in a shared flat, living on short commons and from hand to mouth. Only the wine remains of high quality. He raises his glass to her, but exactly what he is drinking to isn’t clear. A stray hair has come adrift from her chignon and he reaches across to push it behind her ear. She recognises the gesture, feels it in a way she cannot control – more fundamental than a mere
emotion, something organic welling up inside her that manifests itself only in trivial things – a quickening of the heart, a flush at the neck, a deepening of her breathing. ‘So where do we go from here, Squirrel?’ he asks.

‘We go nowhere, Clément. I didn’t come here to be your mistress. I’m here for one thing only, to get you back to England. All you have to do is make your choice. Can’t we at least agree that that is what the damned play was all about? Making a choice?’

He laughs and turns to his food. ‘You don’t let up, do you? You ought to become a lawyer when this whole mess is over. You’d never let the witness off the hook.’

‘I’ve got a job to do. It’s as simple as that. I need to know.’

He pauses, as though trying to construct some kind of answer. ‘There’s a story going round the lab,’ he says eventually. ‘A rumour really, but that’s all we live on these days – rumour and speculation. It’s about Bohr. You know Bohr? I used to talk about him a lot. Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist, the most important man since Einstein.’

Of course she remembers. Bohr was everything that Clément admired – the patient genius who proposed startling ideas while all around were scratching their heads and not knowing what to do, the man who started revolutions and gave a fatherly hand to his followers who struggled in his wake. If I could be any other person than myself, he once confessed, I would be Niels Bohr. The idea seemed absurd. How could one wish to be a person that one was not? And yet here she is, Anne-Marie Laroche; a person whom she is not.

‘Ever since the outbreak of war Bohr has been there in Copenhagen like Fred is here in Paris, living quietly and getting on with his own research despite the occupation. But at the end of last month he disappeared from his home and reappeared in Sweden. And now there’s a rumour that he’s gone to England. Bohr’s an outspoken pacifist. He could easily have stayed in Sweden and appealed to the nations of the world to come
together in peace and harmony, and yet apparently he has gone to England.’

‘What are you trying to say?’

‘They seem to be collecting physicists. Consider who they’ve already got: Chadwick, of course and Cockcroft, and a few lesser types like Oliphant and Feather. But above all there are the Jews who escaped before the war.’ He counts them off on his fingers. ‘Frisch, Szilárd, Peierls, Franz Simon, a dozen others. And then there’s Perrin, von Halban and Kowarski from the Collège. Fermi is already in the US and so is Bruno Pontecorvo, who worked here under Fred a few years ago, and Teller and some others. And now they’ve got Bohr.’ He looks at her. ‘If you see most of the grand masters in the world getting together, you’ve got a pretty good idea there’s about to be a game of chess.’

‘
Kriegspiel
, perhaps.’

‘Perhaps literally.’ He toys with his food for a while. ‘Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?’

Is this the moment to tell him? She hesitates no more than an instant. ‘Yes, I do, Clément. I know exactly what’s going on. Ned told me.’

His expression barely falters. ‘What did he say?’

‘He said it was obvious, that most of the relevant information was published before the war and that anyone could work it out.’ She feels the need to defend her brother, as though by telling her he might have been guilty of some heinous crime. ‘I blackmailed him into telling me, really. I took advantage of his position, accused him of putting his work before his family, that kind of thing. I even accused him of being a coward, which was unfair considering how hard he’s been trying to give up his research and get into the army.’

‘And he told you what?’

‘He never said it directly. He only explained how it might be possible. To make a bomb.’

There is a great stillness. Only the bare, functional kitchen
around them, the tiled range, the sinks, the draining boards and windows now draped with blackout curtains. The voltage of the electricity supply is low and the light bulbs glow like dull anger.

‘He told you that?’

‘They might be, he said they
might
be. Making an atomic bomb. He told me that all the necessary information had been published shortly before the outbreak of war, that you could work it out from that if you bothered to read the papers.’

He looks around as though searching for a way out. But they are in an
impasse
. ‘Is Ned involved? Directly, I mean. Is he working on this?’

‘Not directly, no. I don’t believe so, at any rate.’ For a moment she hesitates, looking at him for some kind of reassurance. ‘Is it a possibility, Clément?’

He nods. ‘Oh, yes, it’s possible. Most certainly, it’s possible.’ He gets up and walks over to the window, draws the blackout curtain aside and peers into the courtyard of the building, as though perhaps there are people out there looking up at them.

‘I heard Ned talk about heavy water. What is it? It sounds ridiculous. Heavy water and light air. Some scientific fantasy.’

He pulls the curtain back and makes sure not a crack of light escapes. ‘It’s a form of water that can be used to encourage fission. It was Kowarski’s pet project. He and von Halban took our entire supply with them when they escaped from Bordeaux, one hundred and eighty-six litres of the stuff, all from Norway. The world’s total supply, in fact. We smuggled it into France during the spring of 1940 but we barely had time to start any experiments before we had to get it out.’

‘In case the Germans got hold of it?’

‘Exactly.’

‘The whole thing was started in Germany, wasn’t it? Ned talked about Hahn.’

He sits back down at the table. ‘Hahn and Strassmann started it, yes – when they did their first work on fission. At the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. But Irène and Pavel Savitch did the same work here, at the Radium Institute.’

‘But if the Germans started it, they could equally well finish it, couldn’t they?’

He shrugs. ‘I don’t know. They’ve got the men – Hahn, Diebner, Weizsäcker, Heisenberg, above all Heisenberg. They have a group called the
Uranverein
, the Uranium Club. Gentner let it slip in a conversation when he was here. Fred and I assumed …’

‘What did you assume?’

‘That they were trying to generate power from the process. Gentner mentioned a
Uranmaschine
, a uranium machine, a kind of nuclear generator that would be able to sustain a controlled chain reaction, giving unlimited energy. It’s quite a realistic possibility. Easier than a bomb. That’s what the heavy water is for, as a moderator—’

‘But they
could
be making a bomb?’

‘Possibly. They’ve got the resources. Czechoslovakia is a good source of uranium, and Norway for heavy water. The difficulty as I see it is getting enough of the right uranium isotope. It’s very rare.’ He opens his hands helplessly, as though things he has been holding safe have just been scattered all over the floor. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this, Marian.’

‘But you are.’ She casts around for something further to say, anger bubbling up inside her, a lava of hot fury. ‘It’s Pandora’s Box, isn’t it? You scientists open it up to see what’s inside and all the ills of the world fly out. And once they’re out, no one can put them back.’

Clément laughs at her indignation, but it is a laugh without much humour. ‘I suppose you’re right, more or less.’

‘Ned said it would wipe out an entire city. In an instant.’

Clément nods. It’s the matter-of-fact gesture that’s so frightening. ‘My estimate is that the whole of the centre of a city like Paris would be totally destroyed by just one such bomb; as far out as, say, Montmartre in the north and Montparnasse in the
south. I mean exactly that – no building left standing. Beyond that it would be the same destruction as an ordinary bombing raid for, what? a further three or four kilometres. Within the inner area everyone would be killed. Outside that a few might survive, only to die days later from the effects of radiation. The question is’ – he looks across the table at her – ‘how can you expect me to get involved with something like that?’

For a moment his guard is down. Bewilderment makes a child of him. Suddenly she feels older than he, as old as her parents, older than her parents, wiser and sadder than anyone could possibly be. ‘A few weeks ago they raided Hamburg,’ she tells him. ‘Maybe you heard about it. They used ordinary bombs, of course, and they laid waste seven square miles of the city, killing fifty-eight thousand people in the process. Not a few hundred, not even a few thousand.
Fifty-eight thousand
. What particular moral equation do you fit those figures into, Clément? You’re good with equations – your wave mechanics, or whatever you call it. How do these figures fit in? The problem with this war, Clément, is that there are no innocents. You can’t stand aside and say it wasn’t your fault. It’s everyone’s fault. At this very moment people are being killed on your behalf. You can’t say you didn’t want it to happen because it
is
happening. Now. And it seems likely a single one of your atomic bombs dropped on Berlin would stop the war in an instant.’

‘Would that make it right?’

‘When it was all over we’d be free to have an anguished discussion about the morality of it all. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to bed.’

She climbs into her cold bed and waits motionless for her body to bring warmth to the sheets. She thinks of Marian Sutro, a person she has been and, perhaps, will be again; a girl possessed of childlike enthusiasms and the capacity for devotion. Where is Marian now? She thinks of Clément beside the lake at Annecy, and Benoît in London, and Scotland, and here in France. She
remembers being in the cinema, with Benoît’s arm around her shoulders and that Pathé newsreel –
Hamburg Hammered
– on the screen. Bombers roaring through the night, with a city of glowing embers in the blackness below them. In the Filter Room she plotted raids going out, the RDF operator whispering in her ear: ‘New track: Victor Oboe, fife-one, eighter-three, ten plus at five, showing IFF,’ while she reached across the table and placed counters on the table where East Anglia bulged into the North Sea, single aircraft growing to dozens, dozens to hundreds, squadrons climbing into a darkening sky and merging into a great stream in their advance towards the Dutch coast, five thousand men setting off into the night. The four o’clock watch used to count them out and the midnight watch would try to count them in as they crept back over the North Sea, battered, shot up, empty of bombs, empty of fuel, empty, finally, of the fear that must have possessed them throughout the hours of the raid. How many dead? And on the ground, how many?