The Match by the Hull

by Albert Einstein, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The fog came down on the Untersee a little after two, when they were perhaps half an hour out from Mammern. It did not roll in, as fog does in stories. It was simply that the far shore, the German one, with its vineyards going brown on the slope above Öhningen, became pale, and then paler, and then it was not there. A minute later the Swiss shore went the same way behind them, and the boat was in a white room about forty metres across with no walls.

The wind went with the shore. The sail hung down from the gaff in folds, like washing.

Ernst Gubler let go of the tiller, because there was nothing for the tiller to do, and took out his watch. Twenty past two. The hospital wanted Lukas back at the station in Steckborn for the ten-to-six train. That left three and a half hours, and the boat was Hanselmann's from the Hirschen, borrowed for the afternoon in exchange for a cupboard door that Ernst had promised to rehang and had not yet rehung.

"We'll wait," he said. "It lifts by four, as a rule, this time of year." The oars lay under the thwarts, but there was no rowing in this; you would only go round in circles and come out at Germany.

His son sat on the middle thwart with his hands between his knees. Lukas was twenty-nine. He had his mother's long jaw and her way of sitting very upright, as if someone had told him once to mind his back and he had never been told he could stop. He had been eleven months in the hospital this time, and he had come home on the Saturday with his good shirt in a paper parcel and a list from the doctor that his mother had pinned behind the kitchen door, and he had slept for most of the Saturday and on the Sunday morning had asked if they could take a boat out, the way they used to.

"We're moving," Lukas said.

"No."

"We are. To the left. Slowly." He did not point. He looked at a place in the fog where nothing was.

Ernst said nothing. This was one of the things on the doctor's list, not in those words but near enough: Do not argue with what he perceives. Do not agree with it either. Speak of practical matters. His wife had read it aloud twice at the kitchen table and then said, "Well, that is how you talk to everyone anyway, Ernst," and he had not known whether she meant it kindly.

He looked at the water. It was flat and grey, the colour of a pewter plate that wants polishing, and the fog lay on it so close that he could see the small drops of it settle and vanish on the surface. There was not a ripple. There was no sound but the drip from the boom.

"Practical matters," he said. "Are you cold? There's the blanket in the locker."

"I'm not cold. Father, how would you know?"

"Know what?"

"That we're not moving."

Ernst opened his mouth to say Look, and shut it again. Look at what? He had been about to point to the shore.

---

He was a cabinetmaker, and for forty years he had known whether a thing was moving or still by holding it against a thing he trusted: a plank against the bench, the bench against the floor, the floor against the house, and the house, he supposed, against the hill it stood on. He had never needed to go further back than the bench. Now he found that the boat was his bench and there was nothing under it but water, and nothing round the water but white.

"The water's flat," he said. "There's no wind. A boat with no wind on flat water doesn't move."

"Unless the water does."

"Water is water."

Lukas got up, carefully, because he knew boats, and went forward to the mast. He felt in his pocket and came out with a ten-centime piece. He reached as high up the mast as he could, held the coin against the wood, and let it go. It dropped straight down and hit the deck at the foot of the mast with a small flat click, and lay there.

"There," Ernst said. "Straight down. If we were moving, it would have fallen behind."

"No," said Lukas, picking it up. "That's what I thought too, the first time. But it was moving along with us before I let go. So it keeps on moving along with us while it falls. It would come down at the foot of the mast either way." He did it again. Click. "You see. It can't tell. Nothing inside the boat can tell."

"Then what are you doing it for?"

"To find out that it can't tell."

Ernst considered this. It had a shape he did not like, the shape of the arguments Lukas used to have with himself on the stairs at night, round and round, every door opening into the same room. But it was not the same, quite. His son was not talking fast. He was standing in a boat holding a coin, and his face had the look it had had at fourteen, bent over the wireless set he built out of the parts of three broken ones, when he had found the fault and not yet fixed it.

"So you can't know," Ernst said.

"Not from in here. You need something outside."

"There isn't anything outside."

"There's the water."

---

They tried the water. Ernst had a box of matches in his jacket, Swedish ones, with a ship on the label. He took one out and dropped it over the side by the stern, beside the rudder. It lay on the surface and did not go anywhere. They watched it. After a minute it was still beside the rudder. After five minutes, still beside the rudder, perhaps a hand's breadth further out, which was the boat swinging, not the match.

"There," said Ernst, and was ashamed at once of how glad he sounded.

Lukas was leaning over the gunwale on his elbows with his chin on his wrists, looking at the match. "Yes," he said. "So we're not moving through the water."

"That's what I said."

"No, you said we weren't moving." Lukas did not look up. "We aren't moving through the water. That's a different thing. The match and the boat and the water could all be going together. Like the coin and the mast."

"Going where?"

"Towards Stein. The Rhine goes out at Stein. All of this," and he made a small movement with one hand that took in the water and the fog and the boat and the match, "is on its way to Stein. Slowly. It has to go somewhere. It comes in at Konstanz and it goes out at Stein, the whole lake, a bit at a time."

Ernst knew this. Everybody on the Untersee knew it, in the way you know your own birthday, without ever having had any use for it. The lake was the Rhine resting. The fishermen at Eschenz talked about the current by the Werd islands, where the water began to remember it was a river and pulled at the nets.

"Near Stein, maybe," he said. "Not out here."

"How would you know?" said Lukas, and this time he smiled when he said it, the first time that day.

---

At three o'clock Ernst ate one of the two apples and gave Lukas the other. They sat with their backs to the gunwales, facing each other across the boat, and the fog sat on them like a third person who had not been introduced. It was cold now, the cold that comes up off a lake in October and gets in at the wrists. Ernst got the blanket out of the locker and Lukas, after some argument, let it be put over his knees.

The match was still by the rudder.

"When I was in the hospital," Lukas said, "there was a man on my ward who could not tell whether he was getting up out of his chair or the chair was going down away from him. He used to hold on to the arms with his eyes shut. The nurses said to him, Herr Brändli, the chair is on the floor, the floor is on the building, nothing is going anywhere. He said, That is what you would say if it was all going together." Lukas turned the apple core over in his fingers. "They wrote it in his notes. I saw them write it."

Ernst did not know what to say to this. He looked at the doctor's list in his head and there was nothing on it for this.

"Was he wrong?" he said at last.

"About the chair? Of course he was wrong." Lukas threw the core over the side. It made a small sound and floated, a little way off from the match. "But not because of what the nurses said. What the nurses said was no good. It was the right answer with the wrong reason." He watched the core. "You can't tell from in the chair. You have to go and stand by the window and look at the church tower across the fields, and if the tower isn't going up past you, you aren't going down. That's all. They never took him to the window."

"Did you?"

Lukas was quiet a while. "Once," he said. "He said the tower might be going down at the same rate."

Ernst laughed before he could stop himself, and then Lukas laughed too, a short surprised bark that went out into the fog and did not come back.

---

At half past three the bell began.

It was a long way off, and in the fog it was hard to say where. Ernst thought first it was Mammern, behind them, which would have pleased him, because it would have meant they were where he believed them to be. But he knew Mammern's bells, and they were deeper than this one. It rang for a long time, not for the hour; for a funeral, perhaps, or a wedding, somewhere on a Sunday afternoon.

Lukas sat up and put his head on one side.

"That's ahead," he said. "That's Stein, or Eschenz. And it's louder than it was."

"It's only just started."

"It started three minutes ago and it's louder now."

"A bell's a bell. It's the fog. Fog does things to sound."

"Fog does the same thing to it all the time. It doesn't do more of it in three minutes." Lukas had his eyes shut. He was listening the way Ernst had seen him listen to the wireless set when he was a boy, as if the sound were a thread and he were following it hand over hand. "It's louder. We're closer."

And now Ernst did not know what to do, because he had heard his son say that he could hear things before. He had heard him say it at three in the morning in the kitchen, with all the lamps lit, about voices in the drain. He had heard him say it to the police sergeant at Steckborn, about the telegraph wires. Each time it had been said in the same voice, quite reasonable, quite certain, and each time Ernst had stood there being the floor, and the house, and the hill.

He listened to the bell. It might have been louder. He could not tell. He was a cabinetmaker; he had a good eye and an ordinary ear.

"I don't know," he said. It came out of him with difficulty, like a screw that has rusted into the wood. "I can't hear it. I don't say you're wrong. I can't hear it."

Lukas opened his eyes and looked at him.

"Then we'll find something we can both see," he said.

---

What they could both see was the match.

It was Lukas's idea, and it was very simple, and Ernst did not understand it until it was done. Lukas took the boathook and laid it along the gunwale on the starboard side, and took Ernst's folding rule out of Ernst's own jacket pocket without asking, which he would never have done before the hospital, or perhaps would have, as a boy. He measured from the rudder post to the match. It was eighty-one centimetres; the match had drifted out a little more as the boat swung. He did it twice. Then he sat back.

"Now," he said. "That's the one thing in the whole world we agree about. Eighty-one centimetres. You think the boat's still and I think the boat's moving, and we both get eighty-one. If you measured it from Mammern with a telescope you'd get eighty-one."

"You couldn't see it from Mammern."

"Pretend the fog's gone."

Ernst pretended. He saw, in his mind, the whole Rheinsee from somewhere high up, from the top of the Hohenklingen above Stein, say, on a clear day: the long grey-green tongue of water, the islands at the end of it like three stones dropped in a gutter, the bridge at Stein, and out in the middle a small boat with a limp sail and two men in it, and beside the boat, eighty-one centimetres from its rudder, a match. And the boat and the men and the match all sliding together down the grey-green tongue towards the bridge, very slowly, the way the minute hand moves, so that you could never see it go but could only see that it had gone.

Or not sliding. Sitting still. From up there he could not have said which either, not without watching for a long time; but from up there, at least, if he watched long enough, he would know.

"It's the same eighty-one," he said slowly, "either way."

"Yes."

"So it doesn't help."

"It doesn't help with which," said Lukas. "It helps with whether we're talking about the same thing." He folded the rule up, one joint at a time, and gave it back.

---

The fog began to go at a quarter past four. It went the way it had come, without fuss. The white thinned to grey and the grey to a kind of brightness, and then there was a line of reeds, very close on the left, much closer than Ernst would have believed, and behind the reeds a garden wall, and behind the wall, low and long, the roof of a chapel with a house joined on to it, and a wooden footbridge going away from it across the water to the Swiss bank.

Ernst knew that chapel. Everybody knew that chapel. It was on the Werd, at the very end of the lake, where the Rhine began.

He looked behind him for Mammern. There was only the long empty water going back east between the hills, and far up it, very small, a white house that might have been the Hirschen.

The bell had stopped. It had been Eschenz after all, or Stein. They had come, he worked out later, the better part of two kilometres, sitting still.

"Well," said Lukas.

Ernst said nothing for a moment. Then he took out his watch. It was twenty past four. If they took an oar each and rowed, they could be at Stein in twenty minutes and he could telephone Hanselmann from the station and put Lukas on the train there; the line ran through to Steckborn and on, and the hospital would never know the difference. That was a practical matter.

He looked over the side. The match was still there by the rudder, a little waterlogged now, darker, eighty-one centimetres out, give or take, where it had been all afternoon.

Lukas leaned over the gunwale, reached down, and picked it out of the water. He dried it carefully on the blanket, between finger and thumb, and held out his hand for the box, and Ernst gave it to him, and he put the match back in with the others.

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ab Albertō Einsteinō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Albert Einstein, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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