Uncertainty
Rosen staggered past a park bench, toward two homeless men rummaging
in a trash bin at the edge of the street and Leipzig's central park. They were that generic type of bum, homo
vagas, aged and ageless, chaotically uniformed, individuals only to themselves. Checking his wound, Rosen zipped up the
leather so the blood wouldn't be noticed.
He felt bad for its former owner, but he'd simply grabbed for something,
as he'd run from the restaurant while the Nazis were beating the waiter who had
tried to intercede for him.
They'd have others chasing him now, maybe even the Gestapo. He couldn't go home or to any of his known
friends. He needed a moment to think, and the bums offered a reasonable cover
for a man none too steady on his feet. Until
1932, when the Jews were expelled from the universities, he would have been
startled by the notion of any similarity.
But now, in 1939, the only issue was who would be rounded up first, the
Jews, the homosexuals, or the vagrants.
Vulnerable on all three fronts, ex-professor Rosen smiled to himself;
even his desperation seemed academic.
He huddled against the trash bin, his back to the street traffic
and the self-congratulatory shouts of Hitler's thugs on their
way to and from one atrocity or another.
There was something wild, unprecedented in the air tonight, and all the
animals felt it, Rosen thought. The
bums snarled at him like small dogs, even as they backed away a few steps, but
when Rosen made no further move toward them, they went back to the trash
bin. With a mumble of triumph, one of
them dumped a twined package of newspaper out onto the grass, and the two began
pawing at the strings. When Rosen saw
the front page of the top paper, he stepped forward, slit the twine with a
penknife, and grabbed at the familiar picture.
The bums snarled again, snatching up the rest of their insulation and
heading deeper into the park to bed down.
A light rain had begun to fall.
Werner
Heisenberg had won the Nobel Prize for Physics. Of all people, Werner! Not only were they both still relatively
young men, but Rosen had always imagined his old scouting friend as a
professional musician. He hadn't seen
him since that night in Bavaria, had he?
Or, at least not since some time shortly thereafter, when the Jews were "officially"
banned from the Pathfinders, and even Werner could no longer allow him to remain
in his scouting group. In all their
years of hiking through the Alps with Gruppe Heisenberg, Werner had never once
discussed physics with his young men as they camped under the stars.
When
the newspaper article mentioned Geldstrasse, right here in central Leipzig,
Rosen made up his mind. While it didn't
give an address, Rosen remembered the house, remembered it from years ago. He
ruefully smiled, because of all the times he'd walked past the house without getting up
the nerve to knock on the door. Now he
had that nerve, because he had no choice.
If anyone was going to be able to help him escape the camps, it would be
Adolf's new fair-haired genius. The
Nazis would need their new super-star, someone to repair the damage done by the
defection of Schrodinger and Einstein.
Rosen dropped the now soggy paper back into the bin and headed off down
the street.
An
impromptu roadblock had been set up at the mouth of Geldstrasse. The Nazis were checking papers, shuffling
people into three lines. The rain was
falling more heavily now, and Rosen feared if he settled down in a doorway for
any amount of time he might fall asleep, or pass out from the loss of blood.
Geldstrasse
was a cul de sac, but from his extensive wanderings on the street, Rosen
recalled that access might be obtained over a low stonewall separating the
garden at the back of Werner’s house from the adjacent street. He set off in a wide arc designed to bring
him back to that spot from a safer approach.
The cobblestone streets were still unpaved in this upper class
residential district, holding out against the sure onslaught of the macadam the
Nazis required for the easy movement of their military transports.
Although
he knew he was bleeding, Rosen hadn't really felt the stab wound much until he
stretched his arm up to try to climb the stone wall at the back of Heisenberg’s
garden. Then he fell back, gasping in
pain.
A
light came on in a house across the street.
Rosen cursed, fearing he had only a moment to get out of sight on the
other side of the wall. He threw his good arm upwards, over the top,
scrambling for purchase with his soaked shoes across the rough stones. He felt himself beginning to slip, and he had
no choice but to reach out with the other arm and pull himself up as hard as he
could. The pain was excruciating, and,
even as Rosen heaved himself over the top, he started to black out.
When
he came to, unknown moments later, Rosen found himself lying face down in the
mud, having narrowly missed drowning in a puddle and skewering himself on
nearby rosebushes. Already soaked
through, he lay there, trying to sense how badly he had hurt himself. To his surprise, the pain in his side
actually had subsided a bit, perhaps from soaking in the cold rainwater. Struggling to his feet, Rosen wound his way
through the little garden to the back of the house. A light shone from the window next to it, and Rosen heard the
familiar strains of Bach coming from a piano.
That piece! He knew that
piece. Abandoning all caution, he began
to knock heavily on the door, a broad grin splitting his face.
The
piano music stopped. The door opened,
and there stood Werner Heisenberg, a little above medium height, still trim and
blond, as Rosen had imagined he would be, but dressed in a particularly
flamboyant black silk shirt with a red scarf draped around the collar.
"Werner?"
"I’m
sorry, you’ve caught me at a bad time –"
"Werner, it’s me, Gerhardt, Gerhardt Rosen."
"Gerhardt,
my God, what’s happened to you? Come,
come, this way." Heisenberg
ushered him through the doorway, but Rosen hesitated, not wanting to soil the
sumptuous furnishings with his soaked and filthy presence. Finally he settled for pulling off his shoes
and socks, wincing from the pain in his side.
Heisenberg asked him again what had happened.
"I’ve
been stabbed," Rosen began.
"The Brown Shirts are chasing me.
I don’t want to put you in jeopardy, but I didn’t know where else to
go."
"Of
course, of course. Let’s get you
cleaned up and into some warm clothes."
Heisenberg, who appeared to be alone in the house, poured Rosen’s bath
himself and helped him undress before going upstairs for clean clothes. The wound was seeping, but it seemed less
severe than Rosen had imagined when he had been climbing the wall. As he settled carefully into the hot water,
Rosen was surprised to see Heisenberg regarding him intently from the
doorway. "Is the water warm
enough? We had a power outage earlier
in the evening. I believe the house was
struck by lightening."
Again
Rosen tried to apologize for putting Heisenberg at risk. "But I thought, of all the people I
knew, had known --"
"Know,"
Heisenberg said emphatically.
Rosen
felt a rush of relief, and more.
"I thought your fame might protect you, protect both of us for a
few days until I can escape."
"Music
does have its consolations," Heisenberg smiled.
Rosen
didn’t follow exactly, but said, "From the garden, I heard you playing the
Bach piece."
"The
Chaconne." Now it was Heisenberg’s
turn to blush.
"It
was the piece you played that night in the Bavarian Alps, when the Pathfinders
stopped at the inn below the Castle.
And then we camped out under the stars, and. . . ."
"I
know." The two men stared at each
other for a moment, and then Heisenberg bent forward, and gently angled Rosen’s
head up with one hand as he leaned forward --
They
both heard the pounding on the front door at that same instant. They jerked away from each other. "The Nazis!" Rosen began.
"It
may be only a bunch of drunken musicians," Heisenberg replied
uncertainly. "Better get dressed
in either event."
"I
didn’t know physicists kept such friends," Rosen said as he rose naked
from the water and gingerly reached for a towel.
"Physicists? What are you talking about?" Heisenberg
replied with a snort. "I gave that
up a decade ago when I decided to take my music seriously."
"But
the newspaper," Rosen began, only to hear the pounding resume.
"Wait
here. If you don’t hear a bunch of
drunks, take that way into the garden."
He unlocked a small door at the back of the bathroom through which
servants at one time must have carried their masters’ ablutions out into the garden
cesspool.
Rosen
had lived among the terrified homosexual community of Germany for long enough
to know the real risks. He threw on the
clothing. As he was struggling with the
sweater Heisenberg had provided, trying not to reopen his wound, Rosen heard
the voices at the front door and recognized their tone and, without making out
the words, their intent. He heard his
friend’s voice raised in protest, and the others, several of them,
insisting. Rosen slipped out the little
door and back into the garden.
The
rain was more intense. Thunder cracked,
and lightening briefly illuminated the street facing the garden as Rosen
huddled less than successfully under the eaves. The bastard in the house across the way must have called the
Nazis at the corner. Damn him. If that were it, Rosen figured, he’d better
get out of the garden, because they’d be looking here next. There was a wooden ladder leaning against
the garden shed. Rosen quickly climbed
the shed, pulling the ladder up after him.
Then he braced the ladder on the shed roof, and began to climb toward
the roof of his friend’s house. He had one
hand on the metal gutter when the lightening struck the house.
#
As
Rosen regained consciousness, he remembered a moment when he hung weightless in
mid-air, falling from one beam of light and reaching out to grasp another. But when he opened his eyes, he was lying
face up in the mud, the rain drenching him.
Before moving, he inventoried himself again, and, except for a dull pain
in his side, exhaustion, general discomfort, depression, fear, and a cold
coming on, he felt surprisingly good.
He listened, and heard nothing at first. But then the faint strains of the Bach Chaconne started up again
inside the house, haltingly, as if the player were struggling to recall what,
only a few minutes ago, had come easily.
Rosen
picked himself up and carefully moved toward the back door, pausing only
briefly, and with a little smile to himself, to pick a rose from his friend’s
garden. The bathroom door was locked,
but, if the Nazis had searched the house, that was to be expected.
The
music stopped as he put his foot on the flagstone stoop of the rear-door. There was complete silence. Hadn’t the Bach piece been intended as an
all-clear signal? Or a come-on? Rosen smiled and knocked quietly on the
door.
"Can
I help you?" asked a voice behind him.
“You’ve caught me at a bad time.”
As
Rosen turned his head, he observed the bathroom door was open again. He turned the rest of the way and saw
Heisenberg standing behind him. Rosen
was surprised he had not recognized his friend’s voice, but was even more
surprised by his dress. The sharp black
SS uniform gleamed like the coat of a hunting carnivore. Werner’s face remained in the shadows; his
thoughts represented more by the gloved fists crossed in front of him. He stood framed in the lightening, staring
at Rosen.
"Ah,
a perfect disguise," Rosen began with a smile, but something in the
other’s face stopped him from extending the rose. It wasn’t just Heisenberg’s look. His entire face seemed subtly altered, leaner, more muscular,
less open. "Have they gone?"
he whispered. When the other continued
only to look at him with that predatory cast, he added, "Werner?"
Hearing
his name spoken aloud seemed to awaken something in Heisenberg’s memory, and
the arms slowly unfolded.
"Rosen? Gerhardt
Rosen?"
Confused,
but somewhat relieved by this recognition, Rosen extended the flower to
Heisenberg. Heisenberg’s fist struck
him on the side of the head before he even saw it coming. Rosen staggered backwards and tripped over
the flagstone and into the mud.
Heisenberg
stood over him, smiling from the top of that dark greatcoat. "The Fates really are with us. On the very night the cleansing begins in
earnest, my old nemesis appears at my door." He extended a hand downward, and, after a moment, Rosen
hesitantly accepted the help to his feet.
But Heisenberg did not then release the hand. "Do you know, you were both the very first homosexual and
the first Jew I ever beat? That night
in the Bavarian Alps, remember?"
"No
--" Rosen began, but the blow to his stomach caught him completely
unaware.
Heisenberg
released his hand and allowed him to slump gasping to his knees. "I confess that, until that night when
you attempted to seduce me, I had doubts about myself. I was too ready to accept the unacceptable,
at least on a theoretical level, but watching you squirm into my tent with your
gaping mouth and girlish eyes suddenly made perversity a real thing for
me. I have to thank you for
that." He kicked Rosen in the
face, sending him sprawling onto his back.
Rosen
tried to gasp through his blood but was overwhelmed with confusion. If this was some sort of performance for the
Nazis Werner believed to be watching from the house or across the alley, it was
all too real.
"It
was the night that determined my future, you know? I saw that my dreams of promoting the greater German culture,
either through music or physics, would have to wait until the culture itself
was cleansed of people like you."
He kicked Rosen in the side, right above the knife wound, and Rosen
cried out as he rolled over into the mud.
"You’re
welcome." Heisenberg’s voice
suggested the trace of a smile, but Rosen couldn’t look up to find out. The pain in his side was excruciating. The knife wound almost certainly had opened
up again. Then someone began pounding
at the front door of the house, and Heisenberg paused. "Would you mind waiting a moment? I don’t imagine this is the first time
you’ve found yourself face down in shit."
Then he kicked again, and Rosen blacked out.
#
Rosen
awoke with a shock and realized it was the sound of lightening striking the
house again. He was lying face down in
the mud, a bitter reminder of Heisenberg’s accuracy in supposing it was not the
first time he had awoken this way in strange environs. He willed open the cramped fingers of his
hand that still clutched the crumpled rose and struggled to his knees.
"Who’s
there?" a voice called from a few yards away.
Werner
Heisenberg was standing in the open rear door of the house, staring out into
the garden, one hand still resting on the door as if he might slam it in
self-defense. He was dressed neither in
the black greatcoat or the flamboyant silk shirt and scarf, but in respectable
woolen pants held up by suspenders and a white shirt open at the collar.
Rosen
knew he was going to die if he didn’t receive medical attention soon. If he was going to die anyway, he preferred to
do it inside, out of the rain and mud.
"It’s me, Gerhardt Rosen."
Heisenberg
made no immediate response. "Rosen?"
he finally repeated, without releasing the door. "You’ve caught me at a bad time. Rosen from the Pathfinders?"
"Yes."
"What
are you doing here?"
"Trying
to escape reality," Rosen sighed hopelessly.
For
some reason this response seemed to interest Heisenberg. "Reality? What do you know about reality?" He released the door and stepped out onto the flagstone, to the
furthest point where the eaves still protected him from the rain.
"May
I come in?" Rosen asked, indicating his sodden and bleeding condition. When Heisenberg nodded hesitantly, Rosen
warily refused the outstretched hand and struggled to his feet, trying to keep
one arm pressed against his bleeding side.
He shed his shoes and sweater on the stoop -- Heisenberg gave no
indication that he recognized them as his own -- and stumbled exhausted into
the foyer. "Would you happen to
have a change of clothes I could borrow?"
"What? Oh, of course. Let me show you to the bathroom where you can change."
"I
know the way." Rosen indicated it with
his head. When Heisenberg looked
puzzled, Rosen thought, good, that makes two of us.
There
was no offer of a bath, but as Rosen toweled himself off and tried to stanch
the bleeding from his side and wipe the now crusted blood from his face, there
was a polite knock at the bathroom door.
At Rosen’s reply to enter, a hand and forearm poked through a foot-wide
crack and dropped what had to be Heisenberg’s gardening clothes on the floor. The door shut. Rosen shrugged mentally and put them on. He’d meant to ask for bandages and tape, but
if he bled all over Heisenberg’s clothing, the man couldn’t very well claim it
was not partly his own fault. Then he
heard the piano, the Bach Chaconne starting up, first hesitantly, and then with
more assurance.
When
Rosen entered the living room, Heisenberg stopped playing but continued to
stare down at the keys. "I seem to
remember playing that once for . . . the Pathfinders. So long ago. A different
lifetime, almost. Before I decided to
devote myself seriously to physics."
"I
heard you won the Nobel Prize," Rosen suggested slowly.
"Yes,"
Heisenberg blushed enthusiastically.
"So
you gave up your music?"
"One
chooses a path."
"Are
you involved in other things? Politics
seem to pervade everything these days."
Heisenberg
frowned. Rosen saw that he looked
exhausted, drained to the point of distraction. "My entire life has been premised on the segregation of its
parts. Physics, music, athletics, they
have nothing to do with each other.”
“Politics? Sexuality?”
When Heisenberg refused to look up, Rosen added, "And now?"
Heisenberg’s
fingers played absently between the black and white keys. Finally, he shrugged. "We choose a path, one of many, and we
follow it. The other possibilities die
off. Still, one cannot help wondering.
. . ."
Rosen
saw him glance at a photograph of a young woman prominently displayed on top of
the grand piano, and another of Heisenberg shaking the hand of Hitler
himself. He didn’t recall having seen
either earlier. "So, no politics?"
Heisenberg
shook his head absently. "I don’t
agree with what’s going on, but Planck persuaded me that we’d have more
influence if we retained our positions of authority in the German scientific
community."
"That’s
what I wanted to talk to you about," Rosen began, but Heisenberg rose from
the piano, holding the framed photograph in his hand and obviously following an
earlier train of thought.
"My
work, do you know what they’re calling it?
`The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.’
I am famous for confirming that we may never know both the position and
direction of a particle. We will always
be uncertain about one or the other.
Or, as Schroedinger would have it, nothing exists but possibilities
until we will reality to choose among them. This is my fiancé,
Elisabeth." He held the photograph
toward Rosen. When the other man didn’t
take it, he placed it back on the piano.
"Werner,
can you help me?"
"What
I said a moment ago about choosing a path, and thereby killing off all the
other possibilities? That idea was the
very root of my research. A point of
light, of reality that is, is actually a bundle of potential quanta. You are going along in your life, a bundle
of potentialities inside you, and you will keep going like that until one day
you choose one potentiality to become your reality. . ." Heisenberg
seemed hypnotized by his own discourse.
"Werner,
I’m gay and I’m a Jew. The Brown Shirts
tried to kill me tonight. If they find
me, they will kill me or ship me off to the camps."
"The
camps?"
Rosen
came up to the piano, bent down, and said in a harsh, low voice, "Don’t
pretend you don’t believe they exist.
Everyone I know has disappeared into them."
"Don’t
you see?" Heisenberg squealed.
"I can’t believe in them, because, if I do, it will mean they do
exist! I’m having enough trouble not
believing in the bomb!"
"What?"
"Never
mind. Forget I said that. I’m confused, that’s all. I’m over-worked,
and seeing you again after all this time, it’s a . . . surprise." Thunder crashed outside, and for a moment
the house itself vibrated with a weird harmonic. "God, there hasn’t been a storm like that since the Bavarian
Alps." As soon as the words left
his lips, he shot Rosen a guilty look.
"Yes,
the Bavarian Alps. Do you remember that
night, Werner?"
"Well,
vaguely. I mean, nothing really
happened. We just talked."
"For
a long time."
"OK,"
Heisenberg conceded, looking away.
"Tell
me, Werner, did you want to touch me?"
Heisenberg
blushed but didn’t answer.
"Did
you want to hurt me, because I was a threat to you?"
"No! I mean, that’s something I would never
do. Hurt you, I mean, because of my own
confusion."
"So
instead you . . . chose?"
Heisenberg stared at him, and Rosen went on. "You didn’t want to be a person who beat others, and you
were afraid to be a person who. . . ."
What could he say? A person who
loved a Jewish homosexual? "So you
are not a Nazi, and not a bohemian musician, but a physicist, a man who cannot
take a position because he is afraid of changing the course of his
reality? Who is afraid even to observe
closely because that might change something?"
Heisenberg
stared at the portrait on the piano, then laid it face down. "I have been engaged for years, but
cannot seem to force myself to take the final step." Slowly he faced the keyboard and began again
to play the Bach Chaconne. "I know
every note that has come before this one," he thumped a key, then
continued to play. "And I know
every note that will come after, as if in this one privileged moment I am
looking out from this single point in time at the entire wave of the
piece. If only life were like that, how
simple our choices would be."
Lightening
crashed and the pounding on the front door began -- again?
"Werner,
you have a choice to make now. I need
your help." Rosen could see he was
awash in uncertainty. The house was
like a pool filling up with it. He felt
it rising up to embrace his knees, then his chest. The world swam before his eyes.
The front door shimmered as if he was seeing it through a liquid, and
waves pulsed from it each time the Nazis pounded on the other side.
"What
can I do, Gerhardt? I haven’t seen you
in fifteen years --"
"Sixteen."
"At
the least my reputation will be ruined for harboring an illegal, whoever he
might be. If I lie to the SS about your
being here. . . ."
"Werner,"
Rosen said, "don’t ask me how I know this, but those other yous, the
Storm Trooper who hurts people for self-righteous pleasure, the artist who
dreams of polymorphous perversity, they still exist. You didn’t destroy them simply by choosing once. You have to choose again and again. You have to choose now. If you open that door. . . ."
Heisenberg
stared at him. "You must think me
an incredible coward. From your
perspective, that would be a reasonable observation." Then, suddenly, he was advancing as if the
doorknob was the single clear point in his vision. As he reached for it, he said to Rosen, "But from the
perspective of the physicist, I am a man who opens doors trusting he can deal
with what is on the other side, though I don’t know what that is. I have made
my reputation by leaping over what none of us understands, by accepting the
inexplicable as a premise and finding a practical means to proceed beyond. This penchant of mine is as responsible for
my Nobel Prize as it was for my remaining in Germany with the belief that, if I
accepted Hitler as a given, I could find a way beyond him to make reality
produce a strong and glorious Germany that will lead the world to its greatest
rather than its darkest moments. Of
course, it doesn’t always work.
Goodbye, Gerhardt. Use the back
door. I will deny you ever
existed."
As
he closed the garden door behind him, the last vision Rosen had was of
Heisenberg taking a deep swallow of uncertainty, and beginning to swing the
ancient, carved yew on its hinges. At
this moment, Rosen thought, we both know who we are, even if we don’t know
where we’re going.
Lightening
crashed overhead, illuminating everything and nothing.