Sherlock Holmes and The Mystery Of Einstein's Daughter

Chapter VII We Plunge into Serbia

I pondered on what our next move would be. Holmes settled the matter. He announced we would take the morning train to Serbia.

‘Surely, Holmes,’ I protested, ‘we must first start our investigations here in Berne, or in Swabia?’

‘You would be mistaken to do so, Watson,’ my comrade replied. ‘If just the one note had been sent, we would have started in Switzerland or Germany. The second note told us that if anything was to be uncovered about Einstein it would be in Serbia. It pointed us to Titel but we shall need to start our search in Novi-Sad. Novi-Sad is the regional centre. That’s where all the records will be held. We may after all need my brother Mycroft’s involvement to find our way through officialdom.’

The early-morning express came roaring into the station. We boarded it, our first stop Zurich, then beyond to Vienna and onward into the Balkans. Thirty-six hours later we arrived in Novi-Sad, a medium-sized town set among acacia trees at the foot of the Fruška Gora hills. The upper slopes were covered with dense deciduous forests providing shelter for deer, jackals, boar and lynx. Our Baedeker told us Novi-Sad itself was home to Hungarians, Germans, Croats, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Greeks, Cincars, Jews, Romanians and Roma. Above, on the right bank of the Danube River, loomed the great Petrovaradin Fortress constructed three hundred years earlier at the 1244th kilometre of the River Danube’s course. Our carriage dropped us at the Hotel Tvrdjava Leopold I, a Renaissance building near the Varadin Bridge.

Holmes was clearly impatient at breakfast. The expected communication from his brother Mycroft had not arrived. Without it we were powerless to start our enquiries. No government employee in this vast and bureaucratic Austro-Hungarian Empire would allow us access to municipal records without proper permissions, in triplicate probably, and stamped with many seals. I suggested we start by purchasing a map of Novi-Sad.

Before Holmes could reply, a crowd of hotel guests flocked into the breakfast room. The tables around us buzzed with life. Teutonic voices filled the air. I questioned the waiter. He explained it was a fishing competition. More than thirty German anglers came down every year at this time to fish on the Franz Joseph Canal, a waterway famed for its variety and quantity of fish - bream, roach, rudd, Prussian carp, bighead carp, perch, pike, cat-fish.

One of the anglers at the next table heard my question. In excellent English he called over, ‘Gentlemen, we have rented thirty-two fishing spots but one of our members couldn’t come. One of you is welcome to join us.’

I looked eagerly at Holmes. He waved a hand graciously.

‘My dear Watson, who am I to stand in your way when it comes to fishing?’

My new host introduced himself as Dr. Herdlitzschke, a specialist in contagious diseases. He himself was resident in Novi-Sad. He would supply the spare seat, fish keeping net and fish bait.

‘Dr. Watson,’ I returned. ‘I too am a medical man. In London.’

It was 8am. The charabanc would leave in an hour.

My fishing companion settled me at a neighbouring peg on the canal bank. Dr. Herdlitzschke informed me he came from southern Germany.

‘From Bavarian Swabia. We have a joke about ourselves. We say “Wir können alles. Außer Hochdeutsch”. In English it means “We can do everything - except speak Standard German”.’

At this very spot, he told me, he had once caught 129 fishes with a float and one hook in a single day, mostly roach and rudd. He had heard of extraordinary catches on the Tisza - cat-fish weighing 90 kilogrammes, river char at more than 30 kilogrammes. In the lakes there were brown trout above 25 kilogrammes. He asked why I was in Novi-Sad. Was it in a professional capacity? His own hospital was staffed more by foreign doctors than Serbians. With the advent of summer he always had room for one more.

‘No,’ I replied, ‘something quite different. My colleague Sherlock Holmes and I are searching for someone. A woman.’

‘Sherlock Holmes!’ he exclaimed. ‘So you are the Dr. Watson!’

I nodded, flattered.

‘The name of the woman you seek?’

‘Lieserl,’ I replied, uncertain of the pronunciation. ‘L-i-e-s-e-r-l.’

‘Lieserl?’ he repeated. ‘Where I come from we have lots of Lieserls but none of them is a woman.’

I stared at him in astonishment.

‘Not a woman?’ I exclaimed.

‘Not exactly,’ he affirmed. ‘In Swabian, the ‘er’ in “Lieserl” describes definitely an infant. Like Büberl or Mäderl. Something very small. We would never use such a name for an adult woman.’

Holmes and I were settling into breakfast at the hotel when a boy in uniform brought an envelope to our table marked SECRET, PERSONAL, ADDRESSEES EYES ONLY. It was from Holmes’s brother Mycroft.

As from No. 10, Downing Street.

I then revealed my discovery. ‘Holmes,’ I chided, ‘how is it you didn’t know Lieserl could only apply to a small child?’

‘My dear Watson,’ came the answer. ‘I’d have been quicker off the mark if my Cambridge tutor had been born in Stuttgart rather than in Hanover where they speak High German. Swabian was as alien to him as Broad Yorkshire with its roots in Old Norse is to you and me. He knew one word in the dialect, Präschtlingsgsälz,as unpronounceable to most Germans as Shakespeare’s honorificabilitudinitatibus is to us.’

‘And the Swabian word means?’ I enquired.

‘Strawberry jam.’

Armed with our new knowledge and the impressive document with its multiple seals we set off for the Town Hall, an imposing building on the north side of the central square. The next two days were spent browsing through municipal and census records under the eye of a watchful civil servant. Nowhere was the name ‘Liese’or ‘Lieserl’ mentioned in connection with the Marić family. The evening of the second day approached. The clerk had been assiduous in pulling out ledgers but we had discovered nothing. We showed our appreciation with a thaler and began to walk in despondent mood back to our lodgings. At some distance from the Town Hall we heard the footsteps of someone hurrying to catch up with us. It was the same clerk.

‘You will learn nothing about the Marić family from official records,’ he said. ‘Miloš Marić’s tentacles stretch into every corner. He knows everyone. He has been an official at district courts in Ruma and Vukovar and appointed to the High Court in Zagreb. He owns a great deal of property - three farms in Banja Luka and large homes in Titel, Novi-Sad and Kać. He is still an official in Novi-Sad’s Serbian Reading Room. No civil servant or cleric would spread gossip about Marić or his family for fear of their livelihood.’

‘What do you suggest?’ I asked.

In a near whisper he added, ‘There is someone who might help you with the information you seek. My cousin. Her name’s Jelena. Jelena’s mother-in-law is a friend but not a blood relative of the Marić family, not a porodica,’ he explained. ‘This puts her distant enough not to feel her lips completely sealed yet close enough to have heard any gossip. I can arrange for you to meet her.’

A message was delivered to our hotel later that evening. We were to rendezvous with Jelena at the Queen Elizabeth Café. We entered the café at the arranged hour. A woman with thick grey hair trimmed short beckoned us. She was seated at a tiny marble-topped table set among potted white lilacs. Slavonic grey eyes in an oval-shaped face watched us carefully as we approached. In accented English she acknowledged the Swiss chocolates we placed before her.

‘I heard about your search,’ she commenced.

She produced a tiny white fluted teacup and placed it on the table.

‘This teacup - it’s the one Albert always requests when he comes to my home for tea.’ She added, apropos of nothing, ‘It was Albert who designed the ulaz za mačku - a cat entrance for my Milica.’

My hopes rose. If we were to discover any link to the mysterious Lieserl, surely it would be from such an intimate source as the woman seated before us. ‘What can you tell us about Mileva?’ I asked.

Jelena planted her elbows on the table. ‘The woman is a mathematical genius. Her father Miloš encouraged her to study mathematics for a good reason,’ she added, now looking down at her hands.

‘For what reason?’ I prompted.

‘For the obvious reason she would need a profession,’ the woman snapped. Her tone was spiteful.

‘If Mileva had stayed in Serbia she would have stayed a spinster for ever. In the Vojvodina culture we consider a woman like Mileva completely unmarriageable.’

She gave what sounded like a snort of contempt. ‘She is ugly. Mileva would never have found anyone to marry her. It is a fact,’ she added conclusively.

Her eyes darted up from her hands and fixed on Holmes.

‘Perhaps you can explain to me why this Einstein married her. After all, he is a German and Germans consider Slavs backward. He is a Jew and Jews marry into their own. She’s four years older than her husband. Marrying a woman several years older is a Serbian custom but it is not a German one. ’She added, ‘And she’s a cripple.’

Her cold stare shifted across to me. ‘Why do you think the Jew married her?’ she asked.

I indicated I had no idea.

‘I could tell you,’ she went on.

I took a sovereign from my pocket and pushed it discreetly to her.

‘The reason is simple,’ she retorted, ‘and unarguable.’

She placed the coin carefully in her purse. ‘Because she gave the young Jew presents!’

‘Presents?’ I echoed.

‘Gifts.’

‘What sort of gifts?’ Holmes asked.

‘Shirts.’

I was confounded by this trivial revelation. Was this some Balkan equivalent of a dowry?

‘Shirts?’ I repeated.

In a high-pitched voice she burst out with two lines of a song, and translated them - spitting the words at us: ‘”In Banok and Bjelopavlice - she called to everyone. To everyone she gave a shirt”.’

Heads swung round. Jelena’s grey eyes turned almost black. With an abrupt movement she stood up, the chair scraping away from the table.

She said in a harsh tone, ‘I have work to do. You must excuse me. I have told you everything I wish to. We have a saying zaklela se zemlja raju da se tajne sve saznaju - the Earth pledged to Paradise that all secrets will be revealed. May you have a pleasant stay in my country and a safe return journey to your homeland.’

The meeting had come to an abrupt and disturbing end.

Over dinner at the hotel I looked at Holmes despondently.

‘A shirt,’ I repeated. ‘We don’t seem to be getting anywhere, do we?’

‘There are certainly difficulties,’ Holmes agreed. ‘We are in the Balkans, dear fellow. We must conduct our affairs according to the precept of the Iron Duke- the whole art of war consists of guessing what’s at the other side of the hill. And now, my dear Watson, since the official records reveal nothing, we must look elsewhere.’

I reminded him that Dr. Herdlitzschke had suggested a check of hospital records. An exceptionally virulent Scarlet Fever epidemic had ravaged the region in the summer of 1903. Four hundred of Novi-Sad’s one thousand children died from that cause alone that year. The Doctor had patrolled hospital wards crammed with dead or dying children, their pulses racing, tongues bright strawberry red, throats a deep crimson.

Another day dawned. We left the hotel and hailed a cab. I showed the cabbie the address of the section for children’s contagious diseases at the Hospital St. László. As I sank back with relief in the familiar cool interior of a Hansom cab, I remarked,

‘What would we do without the Hansom! They say there are 7500 of them in London alone, and many more in Paris, Berlin, St Petersburg and New York.’

Holmes grunted. At the St. László two bored-looking hospital receptionists barely raised their heads at our arrival. Thirty seconds passed in silence, forty, then fifty. One minute. Two. Holmes fingered a Maria Theresa thaler. The heavy coin had an electrifying effect. What was it we wished to know? An animated conversation between the women ensued. To no avail. Some of the records had gone up in flames a few days before. We could try elsewhere, for example the Rókus Kórház, the hospital for poor people. It included a children’s wing for contagious diseases. We discovered nothing there either.

Noting our frustration, the staff at the Rókus Kórház suggested our inability to find any information on this Lieserl might mean she was born ‘Stupid’. There was a special place for such luckless creatures, the State asylum Országos Pszichiátria és Neurológia Intézet. Another cab took us to the asylum. The walls of the dim corridors were crumbling, the floors dirty and cracked. Large damp patches threatened to bring down the ceiling. The stench of mildew was overpowering. The production of another thaler led us to the inner sanctum which turned out to be a dank cellar scattered with crates of old case records and a box of photographs.

A listless woman clerk with long black hair and kohl eyeliner pulled out a ledger listing female patients for the last seven years. The book contained thirteen names, date of arrival, condition (mostly ‘stupidity’, ‘severe stupidity’ or ‘mongoloid idiot’), date of departure or, more often, death. But - no mention of a Lieserl. The clerk closed the sad book. She advised us to pursue our quest among the records at the Wolf Valley Cemetery in District X11.

This time we waved down a Fijaker. The black leather top smelt of the cow it had been until recently. At the cemetery an elderly gravedigger told us that if graves were not paid for year by year the remains were exhumed and placed in a nearby charnel house or disposed of in a garbage heap. Yes, he had dug up and thrown a lot of children’s bones on the heap. Were there any headstones with the name Lieserl? He shrugged. Gravestones for children were not the custom in Serbia. Unchristened children were put in a box and buried at the edge of the cemetery. Sometimes there would be small wooden crosses but they disintegrated in one or two severe winters.

‘You might go to see Father Magyar,’ he advised. ‘He is a priest of the Orthodox Church. He has records of adoptions and children with disabilities.’ The grave-digger accepted a coin gratefully and resumed work on an infant’s half-dug grave, already fourth in line of a further two dozen or more marked out.

The visit to Father Magyar proved equally fruitless. We heard then that a long-standing girlfriend of Mileva called Desana Tapavica was now married to a Dr. Emil Bala, Novi-Sad’s mayor. The mayor received us and told us nothing. The wife refused to meet us. I paid for a search through Politika and other Serbian newspapers. More days passed. We were told Lieserl was the name of an infant who had been christened in the ancient Kovilj Monastery situated between Novi-Sad and Titel. To get to the monastery we bumped along dusty, pot-holed roads, among pale ochre houses with lace-curtained windows and brown wooden shutters. Despite spending hours with a monk searching through every record in the archives, we found nothing. In this strange Serbian world we were out of our depth. Holmes became more and more terse. At home in England, among the coiners and smashers and cheque sharps of London’s underworld, my comrade’s every word, his every glance suggested he knew something you didn’t, some secret which would give him the eternal upper hand - but here, in the Balkans...

We had arranged for our post to await collection at the principal Post Office. The sole letter was from the bank robber John Clay. He mockingly signed himself with the initials of his former alias, Vincent Spaulding.

‘Berne. Mission successful. Two regular out-going payments appear on A. Einstein’s accounts, to proprietor of house on Tillierstrasse and to M. Maritsch-Einstein. No further such payments. V.S.’

There was a Postscript: ‘No need to remit fee - the Spar Leihkasse Bank has paid generously on your behalf.’

The Tillierstrasse payments were presumably the rent. Housekeeping costs would account for the payments to Albert Einstein’s wife. We left the Post Office and returned to the hotel.

‘Watson,’ Holmes mused, ‘we find a world of strange anomalies and questionable clues. We reach. We grasp. What is left in our hands at the end? A shadow. The more we investigate the details and circumstances, the more inexplicable they become. We must work on the supposition this Lieserl is a child and that she is connected in some way to Einstein. Despite all our efforts we have been unable to discover anything about her - no legal papers, no family papers such as a baptismal certificate, no death certificate, no other customary civic record. How can this be? Every detail of every Serb from birth to death is minutely recorded and stored - in doctors’ offices, town halls, churches, monasteries, synagogues, yet not one document concerning a Lieserl exists. Why the lack even of a birth certificate?’

With frustration in his voice he continued. ‘In a world so filled with officials and paper - do we assume there never was a Lieserl?’

I remained silent. I knew from lengthy experience Holmes was in no way asking my opinion on the matter.

‘Or is someone a step ahead of us at every turn. If so - why?’

He stood up with a clouded brow and went to the window. The lights were coming on in Novi-Sad.

‘The word ‘Titel’ brought us to Serbia to make a search for Lieserl,’ he mused. ‘We are in a town in a land in a region where rumour-mongering is a way of life, yet whenever we enquire about Lieserl every door slams, every voice abruptly stills. So far we have been offered three theories. Dr. Herdlitzschke suggested Lieserl might have died inthe1903 epidemic of scarlet fever. Death certificates exist for every one of four hundred child victims but not for a Lieserl. The Rókus Kórház hinted without any evidence that the infant might have been sent to another village for adoption. The monk at the Kovilj monastery told us he had never heard of anyone with that name and suggested she might have been packed off to an institution for imbecilic infants. Yet from Clay’s inspection of Einstein’s bank account there is no evidence he makes more than the two regular payments, not to an adoptive family nor a home for mongoloid children.’

Holmes turned back from the window. ‘All we can say is that if there is a connection between Einstein and Lieserl, every effort has been made - by public officials, priests, monks, friends, relatives and relatives by marriage - to seek out and destroy every document with the child’s name on it. The question is - why?’

He paused. ‘Either we go on striving like the Old Man in Alice, to “madly squeeze a right-hand foot into a left-hand shoe”, or - ’

In gloomy silence we ate a dinner of soup made from carrots, chicken, rice, lemon and vinegar, followed by thin rolled pancakes filled with ground meat, topped with sour cream and a bright red relish made from red bell peppers. On the way to our rooms the hotel proprietor handed us an envelope which had been left at the desk. Our names were inscribed on the envelope in the same handwriting and same red ink as the mysterious notes. The envelope held two tickets for the evening performance of Zorka’s Magical Marionette Show.