apply.”54
In the fall of 1901, Einstein took an even humbler job as a tutor at a little private academy in Schaffhausen, a village on the Rhine twenty miles north of Zurich. The work consisted solely of tutoring a rich English schoolboy who was there. To be taught by Einstein would someday seem a bargain at any price. But at the time, the proprietor of the school, Jacob Nuesch, was getting the bargain. He was charging the child’s family 4,000 francs a year, while paying Einstein only 150 francs a month, plus providing room and board.
Einstein continued to promise Mari that she would “get a good husband as soon as this becomes feasible,” but he was now despairing about the patent job. “The position in Bern has not yet been advertised so that I am really giving up hope for it.”55
Mari was eager to be with him, but her pregnancy made it impossible for them to be together in public. So she spent most of November at a small hotel in a neighboring village. Their relationship was becoming strained. Despite her pleas, Einstein came only infrequently to visit her, often claiming that he did not have the spare money. “You’ll surely surprise me, right?” she begged after getting yet another note canceling a visit. Her pleadings and anger alternated, often in the same letter:
If you only knew how terribly homesick I am, you would surely come. Are you really out of money? That’s nice! The man earns 150 francs, has room and board provided, and at the end of the month doesn’t have a cent to his name! ... Don’t use that as an excuse for Sunday, please. If you don’t get any money by then, I will send you some . . . If you only knew how much I want to see you again! I think about you all day long, and even more at night.
56
Einstein’s impatience with authority soon pitted him against the proprietor of the academy. He tried to cajole his tutee to move to Bern with him and pay him directly, but the boy’s mother balked. Then Einstein asked Nuesch to give him his meal money in cash so that he would not have to eat with his family. “You know what our conditions are,” Nuesch replied. “There is no reason to deviate from them.”
A surly Einstein threatened to find new arrangements, and Nuesch backed down in a rage. In a line that could be considered yet another maxim for his life, Einstein recounted the scene to Mari and exulted, “Long live impudence! It is my guardian angel in this world.”
That night, as he sat down for his last meal at the Nuesch household, he found a letter for him next to his soup plate. It was from his real-life guardian angel, Marcel Grossmann. The position at the patent office, Grossmann wrote, was about to be advertised, and Einstein was sure to get it. Their lives were soon to be “brilliantly changed for the better,” an excited Einstein wrote Mari. “I’m dizzy with joy when I think about it,” he said. “I’m even happier for you than for myself. Together we’d surely be the happiest people on the earth.”
That still left the issue of what to do about their baby, who was due to be born in less than two months, by early February 1902. “The only problem that would remain to be solved would be how to keep our Lieserl with us,” Einstein (who had begun referring to their unborn child as a girl) wrote to Mari, who had returned home to have the baby at her parents’ house in Novi Sad. “I wouldn’t want to have to give her up.” It was a noble intention on his part, yet he knew that it would be difficult for him to show up for work in Bern with an illegitimate child. “Ask your Papa; he’s an experienced man, and knows the world better than your overworked, impractical Johnnie.” For good measure, he declared that the baby, when born, “shouldn’t be stuffed with cow milk, because it might make her stupid.” Mari
’s milk would be more nourishing, he said.57
Although he was willing to consult Mari’s family, Einstein had no intention of letting his own family know that his mother’s worst fears about his relationship—a pregnancy and possible marriage—were materializing. His sister seemed to realize that he and Mari
were secretly planning to be married, and she told this to members of the Winteler family in Aarau. But none of them showed any sign of suspecting that a child was involved. Einstein’s mother learned about the purported engagement from Mrs. Winteler. “We are resolutely against Albert’s relationship with Fraulein Mari
, and we don’t ever wish to have anything to do with her,” Pauline Einstein lamented.58
Einstein’s mother even took the extraordinary step of writing a nasty letter, signed also by her husband, to Mari’s parents. “This lady,” Mari
lamented to a friend about Einstein’s mother, “seems to have set as her life’s goal to embitter as much as possible not only my life but also that of her son. I could not have thought it possible that there could exist such heartless and outright wicked people! They felt no compunctions about writing a letter to my parents in which they reviled me in a manner that was a disgrace.”59
The official advertisement announcing the patent office opportunity finally appeared in December 1901. The director, Friedrich Haller, apparently tailored the specifications so that Einstein would get the job. Candidates did not need a doctorate, but they must have mechanical training and also know physics. “Haller put this in for my sake,” Einstein told Mari.
Haller wrote Einstein a friendly letter making it clear that he was the prime candidate, and Grossmann called to congratulate him. “There’s no doubt anymore,” Einstein exulted to Mari. “Soon you’ll be my happy little wife, just watch. Now our troubles are over. Only now that this terrible weight is off my shoulders do I realize how much I love you... Soon I’ll be able to take my Dollie in my arms and call her my own in front of the whole world.”60
He made her promise, however, that marriage would not turn them into a comfortable bourgeois couple: “We’ll diligently work on science together so we don’t become old philistines, right?” Even his sister, he felt, was becoming “so crass” in her approach to creature comforts. “You’d better not get that way,” he told Mari. “It would be terrible. You must always be my witch and street urchin. Everyone but you seems foreign to me, as if they were separated from me by an invisible wall.”
In anticipation of getting the patent-office job, Einstein abandoned the student he had been tutoring in Schaffhausen and moved to Bern in late January 1902. He would be forever grateful to Grossmann, whose aid would continue in different ways over the next few years. “Grossmann is doing his dissertation on a subject that is related to non-Euclidean geometry,” Einstein noted to Mari. “I don’t know exactly what it is.”61
A few days after Einstein arrived in Bern, Mileva Mari, staying at her parents’ home in Novi Sad, gave birth to their baby, a girl whom they called Lieserl. Because the childbirth was so difficult, Mari
was unable to write to him. Her father sent Einstein the news.
“Is she healthy, and does she cry properly?” Einstein wrote Mari. “What are her eyes like? Which one of us does she more resemble? Who is giving her milk? Is she hungry? She must be completely bald. I love her so much and don’t even know her yet!” Yet his love for their new baby seemed to exist mainly in the abstract, for it was not quite enough to induce him to make the train trip to Novi Sad.62
Einstein did not tell his mother, sister, or any of his friends about the birth of Lieserl. In fact, there is no
