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I had awoken my strength. I would not endure humiliation at Albert’s hands again, whether personal or professional. If Albert didn’t appreciate the meek helpmate I had become in our latter years together—the failed physicist from whom he could pilfer ideas at will and the wife bendable at his beckoning—he positively loathed the return of the old Mileva in Berlin. And that was precisely who would greet him at the door when he returned from his cowardly flight to his lover, Elsa. The very thought of Elsa—all perfumed and dyed blond hair, exactly the sort of idle, pampered, bourgeois woman about which Albert used to complain—sickened me. Less because she had “stolen” Albert from me and more because of her perfidy. “Please, Mrs. Einstein, allow me to help you,” Elsa had said with an obsequious smile when the boys and I went to Berlin alone in the days after Christmas to find an apartment. Albert had sent her over to the hotel to “assist” us without my foreknowledge. Staring at the ruby-red smile painted upon her lips, I couldn’t speak. Her audacity coming here, seeking out the woman she’d betrayed, silenced me. Elsa, as she insisted we call her, continued regardless.
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