It wasn’t what Lucas had been expecting, but he answered anyway, just to move on. “Western Europe.”
“Army, or marines?”
“Army.” But that was as far as he was willing to go with it; he was not about to delve into his work for the CRC. He knew that the students, if left to their own devices, would happily lead him down the garden path for the rest of the period. “Now, if those of you sitting closest to the windows could please lower the blinds, we can get started.”
Once the room was suitably darkened, Lucas signaled the projectionist to dim the remaining lights, lower the screen at the front of the room, and cue up the first slide. A slightly dim and scratched image of one of classical antiquity’s most renowned sculptures, the Discobolos, appeared to the right of the podium.
“When we talk about classical art,” Lucas said, “we are talking about a golden age, dating from 480 BC, when Athens rose to prominence and the Greek empire expanded, to 323 BC. That was when Alexander the Great perished in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon. It was a turning point, a time when artists had mastered the art of carving in marble and produced a host of exquisitely rendered sculptures. One of the most famous is this, the Discus Thrower; for the first time, sculptors had learned to capture the human body in motion. Their figures weren’t stiff and unyielding and fixed in a formal posture anymore. Instead, they came alive as three-dimensional entities, free and unrestrained and even, at times, joyous.”
He could hear the pens scrawling notes in the shadowy hall, and he went on with his lecture, calling up slide after slide — briefly sketching in the seven great periods of Greek sculpture, from the Mycenaean of 1550 BC to the Hellenistic, which flourished on the mainland hundreds of years later. Fortunately, he had almost no need of his written notes; he knew this material cold. But he had not reckoned on the difficulties he would have reading with only one eye in such a dimly illuminated space. He found that he had to bend his head to the podium to see what the next topic was, and in order to see the images projected on the screen, he had to repeatedly turn sideways. It might be wise, he thought, to bring a flashlight with him to the next lecture.
When the bell in the university chapel, just across the quad, rang the hour, the projectionist raised the lights and screen, the students near the windows lifted the blinds, and Lucas looked up, blinking. Already, someone in a navy blue Windbreaker and baggy trousers was hastily exiting the last row and ducking out into the hall. Had the lecture been that boring?
“I assume you all have the syllabus,” he called out, “and will have read the first two chapters of Greco-Roman Antiquity before the next class. My study is downstairs, here in the museum, and my hours will be posted on my door this afternoon.” At Princeton, offices were called studies, just as seminars were called precepts.
Half the class was already streaming up the aisle.
“And be sure to sign up for at least one private conference before the end of the semester.”
And then they were gone, the light in the projection booth was out (did the old man ever come out for air, Lucas wondered?) and he gathered up his notes in the empty hall. It all seemed surreal somehow. Now that he was actually standing at a podium again, it was hard to imagine that only weeks before, he had been dodging bullets, digging through rubble in war-torn towns, and searching for iron mines and hidden loot.
If he ever forgot, he had the dull ache in his head from the shrapnel wound, not to mention the glass orb concealed beneath the black patch, to remind him.
Crossing the museum lobby, he waved to Wally, the janitor, running a mop around the floor.
“Welcome back, Prof,” Wally called out. “Glad you made it back in one piece.”
Or nearly, Lucas thought; he was not about to debate the point.
It wasn’t just that the memories were often hard ones — Lucas would never forget the German boy, Hansel, accepting the Hershey’s bar a split second before his foot triggered the land mine. It was also the fact that words did not seem capable of doing justice to horrors like that, and a thousand others he had witnessed. If you had never seen war up close, it was an easy thing to be brave and bellicose about it. But if you had, it was hard not to despair. What men could wantonly do to each other, in the name of nation or faith or ideology, was unthinkable.
In a courtyard outside, students were hanging around, smoking and talking, and killing time before their next class began. A few undergraduates were gathered under a tree, gawking up at a window in Fine Hall, the venerable building that housed the Mathematics Department. Lucas, wondering what was so interesting, followed their gaze and saw, perched in a window seat behind a lead-paned window adorned with a mathematical symbol in stained glass, the indistinct form of a man. He appeared to be writing with great concentration on a pad in his lap.
Around his head there was a wild corona of white hair, and one hand came up to absentmindedly brush a thick moustache.
“I saw him getting an ice cream cone in Palmer Square,” one said.
“I said hello to him, on Washington Road.”
“Did he say hello back?” a third asked.
“I don’t think he heard me. I’m not even sure he saw me. He was off in a cloud.”
Although it wasn’t Lucas’s first sight of Albert Einstein — on one occasion he had seen him strolling through a snowstorm toward the separate office he maintained at the Institute for Advanced Study — it was still thrilling to see the man who had revolutionized physics with equations that challenged, and overturned, the long-accepted ideas of space and time. He had become a celebrity, on a par with Joe Louis, Judy Garland, and Gene Kelly. Who would ever have thought that such a thing could happen to a scientist, much less one whose discoveries were incomprehensible to all but a select few?
At the faculty lounge in Chancellor Greene, Lucas picked up his mail from the pigeonhole with his name on it in the front foyer — it looked like even more university paperwork to fill out — and then, inside, was greeted with a booming “Hail the conquering hero!” from Patrick Delaney, who bounded up from his leather chair like a man half his considerable size, and wrapped Lucas in a bear hug. Delaney was the one-man Department of Mineralogy and Geophysics, whose research into radio isotopes was about as understandable to a lay audience as Einstein’s work, though his fame extended no farther than the wainscoted walls of the lounge. Lucas had always had the sense that some of Delaney’s research was secretly supported with government funds. Taking in the eye patch, he gave Lucas’s shoulder a consoling squeeze, then said, “You do know, right, that the ladies are going to love that patch? Very dashing.”
“I’ll let you know how it works.”
“You won’t need to.”
“How come?”
“Have you forgotten that you’re back in Princeton, the only place on earth where news travels faster than the speed of light?”
“Speaking of which, I just saw the man himself.”
“Herr Professor?”
“I see they’ve got him on display, up in the tower of Fine Hall.”
“Why not — top study for the top dog,” Delaney said, going to the sideboard and pouring two cups of coffee from a dented percolator. “Cream and sugar?” he asked.
“No, black, thanks.”
“That’s good. We don’t have any cream or sugar.”
They both laughed, and Lucas said, “Someone didn’t ration his coupons carefully.”
“Yeah, if you ask me, that bastard Hitler’s got a lot to answer for.”
The table in the center of the lounge was cluttered with ashtrays filled with cigarette butts, and newspapers stained with coffee rings. Not a thing had changed here, Lucas reflected, dropping into a worn leather chair opposite Delaney’s. “Where is everybody?” he asked.