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A World without Echoes

2021; Duke University Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/0961754x-8911147

1538-4578

Megan Weiler,

History of Science and Natural History

The next day, Sunday, their father brought a book down from his room. It was a book of photographs of snow crystals taken by a man named W. A. Bentley. Born on a Vermont dairy farm in 1865, Bentley at the age of fifteen was given a microscope by his mother, a former schoolteacher. He became passionately absorbed in looking through it at various tiny objects, eventually focusing on snow crystals. After some years of trying to draw them he managed to buy a camera, again with his mother's help and over the strenuous objections of his father. It was one of the first Kodaks available for amateur use, using paper film.After months of trial and error he succeeded in connecting his equipment in such a way that he was able to photograph individual snow crystals. He devoted the remaining forty-six years of his life to creating these photomicrographs, alongside working on the dairy farm, “and thereby made it possible,” as the book's flowery introduction put it, “for others to share at leisure, and by the comfortable fireside, the joys that hour after hour bound him to his microscope and his camera in an ice-cold shed.”Looking at the photographs as they sat in the living room, Ella was struck by the hard, severe geometry of the crystals, white against a black background, so different in appearance from the fluffy delicacy of snow. It reminded her of seeing people's skeletons in the X-ray.Their father was telling Ella and Alex about the mysterious process, even now not fully understood, by which these crystals were formed. It all started with a nucleus, which could be anything, a speck of dust, a water droplet, a grain of airborne sea salt. The basic hexagonal shape was based on the structure of the water molecule; but after that the rest was up to chance—that is to say, the various environmental conditions which the crystals encountered during their descent to earth: the wind, the sun, the electrical charge in the air, the degree of saturation with moisture, minute objects encountered along the way, and other myriad factors so slight they could hardly even be detected. This descent was, so to speak, a crystal's “life story.” Each side of the hexagon grew independently, their father said, so that in order for snow crystals (not to be confused with snowflakes, which were many crystals clumped together) to have the symmetry they did, separate chances or accidents had to occur on all six sides.“And that seems nothing short of miraculous to me. Think about it: if each snow crystal is so unique that the chance of two being formed alike is one in a figure consisting of one with five million zeros behind it, then the likelihood of this same structure happening six times within the same snowflake can only be described as a miracle!”He insisted several times on this word, miracle.Ella looked at him skeptically. She thought it odd that her father, a scientist, should be talking about miracles. When she was young she used to let her gaze wander over the bookshelf by the side of the piano while she did her finger exercises. One title happened to be across from her at eye level and she'd see it every time: Chance and Necessity, by Jacques Monod. Monod had once been at their house for dinner. The thesis that all phenomena in the universe were the product of a combination of accident and laws of nature was plausible to Ella, and she had no doubt at all that this was the way it was. There were no miracles.“But the same ambient conditions would surround a falling crystal on all sides; wouldn't that be enough to explain the symmetrical growth?” She tried arguing with her father. Afterward, she read that in fact there were often tiny differences among the dendrites, and these were visible in Bentley's photographs, too.At the time, she insisted on her point and they debated back and forth until suddenly, too late, it occurred to Ella that miracle was the whole purpose of what her father was saying. He wanted there to be something scientifically inexplicable, as a loophole in the law of necessity through which he himself might escape.Ella and Alex were having breakfast. Nina had come back the previous evening and had left for work by the time Ella came upstairs. She left the breakfast table set with cups, plates, silver, jams and butter, the tulips that Ella and Alex had bought at the grocery store to welcome her home, and her Brigitte magazine next to the newspaper.Alex resolutely put the magazine face-down on the chair, after having remarked on the resemblance of the face on the cover to the Picasso lithograph of Jacqueline in the living room and the Jawlenski painting in the stairwell. “It's as if she has to surround herself with images confirming the idea of her own handsome face.”Ella wondered at his scorn. She didn't think that he felt any real animus against Nina. Perhaps he just felt like saying something spiteful; or maybe he was trying to create common ground with Ella by disparaging her.They were both puzzled by the fact that Nina hadn't spoken to their father, as they found out when they called him. He seemed puzzled by this himself and kept saying, “Many greetings to Nina.” She had left a note on the table saying that she wouldn't be back before three, since she had a lab meeting at two.The evening before, their father was already back at the clinic when she came home. Alex and Ella had sat with her for a while in the living room. She told them how she had taken both of her children on a shopping expedition after the graduation ceremony.“Sophie got an antique armoire, a restored Bauernschrank; she had wanted one for a long time. Lukas originally asked for a mirror, but of course mirrors are so difficult, I mean, a really beautiful mirror just has to come to one; and then he remembered that he wanted a suit. Of course he already had two suits, one that he bought in Italy and the other he had custom-made in Thailand. But they were both so loose, of course that was the fashion for a while, everything loose and baggy, and during the ceremony it must have become clear to him that he felt uncomfortable with this. We found him a fabulous suit. It fits him like a glove. Not black, I think black has something so sad about it. Dark gray, with a subtle stripe. Fabulous.”“Nina has never really gone beyond the mentality of Brigitte magazine,” Alex was saying now. “All of her experiences are fit into that somehow. They're simply a family of philistines—that's why we can't understand them and they can't understand us. Did you know that when Sophie and Lukas arrive in St. Hilaire, the first thing they do is to blow up these floating seats and make themselves drinks and drink them floating in the swimming pool, as if they were in Hollywood or something?”Alex had once visited their father and Nina in France. He had stayed as a guest at Nina's house, presumably to taste the luxurious lifestyle. Ella had never been there.“And did you get that,” he went on, “that Rainer went on the highway in a state of complete intoxication?”“Yes, I got that.” Ella had to laugh at his translation. In Nina's words, her ex-husband had insisted on driving back to Hanover after the celebration dinner, “even though of course he'd had his share of wine and Schampus. And he must have floored it because no sooner had my head hit the pillow than I got a text message saying that he'd already arrived home.”Nina's way of expressing herself was very different from theirs, full of breezy German colloquialisms and slang expressions with which Ella was unfamiliar. It had a sort of upper-class flippancy that seemed to minimize everything. Ella had been irritated by the way Nina had referred to her father's binge the year before. “He must have,” she said with a little laugh, “really hit the bottle that time. But then I guess he saw himself that it couldn't continue like that.”Apart from the out-and-out lie that Ella's father had now finally seen the light, phrases like “hit the bottle” were more subtly falsifying. They held reality at a distance, like a screen placed between herself and it. Ella thought to herself that they reflected the softly cushioning effect of having plenty of money. Her father in the past had always spoken contemptuously of “merchants” (among whom he counted doctors), but she suspected that this mentality of Nina's had been a large part of her attraction for him as well.That day, their father was scheduled for a radiation treatment at one o'clock. But he said he didn't want them to visit him beforehand, because he had to get ready “a good bit ahead of time, you never know, there could be an opening earlier and then you might have to be ready at a moment's notice.” Ella suspected that he was glad to have an excuse to take a break from their company.Alex was going to stay home; Ella decided to take Nina's bike and go downtown. It was a beautiful morning. The air was clear and so brisk that she wore a hat and scarf and gloves. When she reached the path through the woods, she felt a surge of happiness from the physical pleasure of being on a bicycle, combined with the release of being out of the house and on her own.Full of energy, Ella put all her weight into the pedals, expanding her lungs with air. As she was approaching the lakeside esplanade she passed a woman and a small girl on bicycles. She smiled at them, thinking that she and the woman were about the same age. Next a father and his little boy were blocking her path. She thought of ringing her bell, but fortunately decided to be patient. The father told his son to move over, grumbling something about “highway.” As she passed them she looked back—it was Anton!Ella hadn't seen Anton in over twenty years. They had grown up in the same apartment building; he was a year younger. They had read all the novels of Karl May together. When they played Indians, Anton always wanted to be Winnetou; but Ella didn't want to be Old Shatterhand, so other characters had to be invented.Anton recognized her immediately too—“Ella!”—and they both came to a stop. “You still look the same as before!” he said. He was going to shake Ella's hand, but she impulsively gave him a hug. His wife and daughter came to a stop behind them. Introductions were made. They were on vacation, staying at his family's old apartment. Anton told his wife to go on with the children so that he could talk to Ella. His wife didn't seem to like that suggestion, and he suggested instead that they meet for coffee on the weekend.“You go ahead,” he said to Ella as she was getting back on her bike. “You had already passed us anyway.”She rode on toward the town, the calm, gleaming surface of the lake to her left. The surprising encounter raised her already high spirits. She must have been smiling broadly, because another boy on a bicycle, about nine or ten years old, smiled back at her and pointed at a squirrel that had just run across the path. When she started to pass him, he thought they were having a race and began pedaling furiously. She took him up on it and went into a racing position; thereupon he boldly drove right over a strip of lawn to get ahead of her. “But that's dangerous!” Ella said, startled, and gave up the chase. After a bit he turned back, smiling and saying Tschüss to her as if she were a playmate.Ella wondered at her own exuberance. It felt as if she were bursting out of a straitjacket of sadness.In town she first went to the bookstore. She bought two novels by Robert Walser and a volume of poems by Joachim Ringelnatz. Her father had recited one of his poems a few days ago, about a boomerang which, because it was a little too long on one side, flew off never to return. Her father altered the poem so that he himself was the boomerang.