The letter sat on Margarita Konenkova’s dressing table, a thick envelope addressed in a handwriting she had come to know as well as her own. Inside, Albert Einstein had done something extraordinary: he had written to her husband, Sergei, claiming that Margarita was seriously ill. The great physicist had gathered letters from his doctor friends, all of them insisting that Madame Konenkova should spend time in the healthy climate of Saranac Lake, Einstein’s favorite retreat. It was a bold lie, an elaborate ruse, and Margarita knew it.

She also knew what it meant: Einstein, at fifty-six, had fallen for her completely and was no longer willing to meet in stolen hours. He wanted her near him, openly. What she could not have known, standing there with the letter in her hands, was how profoundly this deception would reshape her life, nor where it would ultimately lead. The affair with the most famous scientist in the world would define her remaining years, follow her back to the Soviet Union, and end in a loneliness so total that she would simply stop eating.

Long before she met Einstein, Margarita had learned how to make an impression. She had come from the small town of Sarapul, a provincial girl with ambitions that reached far beyond the Urals. In Moscow, she moved into the home of a Doctor Ivan Bunin and enrolled in law courses. It was in the city’s bohemian circles that she met Sergei Konenkov, already a celebrated sculptor and no longer young.

He fell in love with the girl so completely that she soon appeared at his apartment door and stayed for the next seven years, becoming his shadow, his muse, his constant companion. Margarita slipped effortlessly into the current of Moscow’s high society. Her marriage to Konenkov seemed cloudless, though this did not stop her from conducting romances with men like Sergei Rachmaninoff and Feodor Chaliapin. Her husband, of course, saw everything.

But Konenkov was not only a talented sculptor, he was also a wise man, and he chose to ignore his young wife’s flirtations rather than confront them. In 1923, the Konenkovs sailed to America to take part in an exhibition of Russian and Soviet art in New York. The trip was supposed to last only a few months. It lasted twenty years.

In the United States, Margarita shed the gray, dull clothing of Moscow and embraced the style of American bohemia entirely: luxurious dresses, sheer ribbed stockings, exquisite jewelry. The Konenkov salon became fashionable, and Sergei, handy with his tools, built a carved wooden bar with his own hands. Margarita, for her part, charmed everyone. Much of her husband’s success could be traced directly to her social grace: influential Americans commissioned his work, and in 1935 the administration of Princeton University ordered a bust of the scientist Albert Einstein.

Einstein was then fifty-six years old. He had married twice, fathered children, and acquired, alongside his reputation as a genius, a reputation as a great lover of women. His first wife had been Mileva Marić, a Serb four years older than the young Albert. Their son Hans Albert later wrote that his mother was a typical Slav with very strong and persistent negative emotions, a woman who never forgave an insult.

Einstein, for his part, had not behaved toward her like a gentleman. When they were still living together unmarried, Mileva became pregnant and went to her parents in Serbia to give birth, but returned without the newborn child. Einstein believed an illegitimate child would damage his scientific career, and the world of that time judged such matters harshly. Even after they married and had two more sons, both legitimate, the marriage remained cold.

Mileva was constantly jealous of Albert, who enjoyed enormous success with women. Sometimes a wealthy lady would arrive in an automobile and carry him off for the whole day. It was difficult to endure, and eventually the couple separated. But Mileva drove her bargain with mathematical precision: she demanded that Einstein give her the Nobel Prize money, which he of course did not yet have.

He gave his word. And when the prize came, Mileva received it. After the divorce, Albert looked around, and the first person he saw was his cousin Elsa. She pursued the scientist with almost indecent persistence.

Contemporaries described Elsa as a woman of limited intellect who loved only dresses, jewelry, sweets, and Albert Einstein, along with his fame. She cared for him like a hen and was jealous as a wasp, feeding his mistresses chocolate and sweets. Elsa stayed at home and grew plump, while insisting on traveling only first class, convinced that nothing less suited her husband’s status. Einstein himself was utterly indifferent to luxury, until 1935, when he crossed the threshold of the Soviet sculptor Sergei Konenkov’s studio and met his wife, the magnificent Margarita.

The scientist was fifty-six; she was thirty-nine. By then, Einstein lived in Princeton. Konenkov visited the town only once, after which he continued work on the bust without the original model. Margarita, however, began appearing there with increasing frequency.

After Elsa died in 1936, Margarita Konenkova firmly took her place at the great scientist’s side. For three years, the lovers could meet only in short bursts, a few hours at a time. Einstein, genuinely in love, found this intolerable. And so the great physicist, who was also a great adventurer, attempted a grand deception.

He wrote his long letter to Sergei Konenkov, claiming that Margarita was seriously ill and enclosing the doctors’ certificates he had obtained from his physician friends. The doctors strongly advised that Madame Konenkova spend most of her time in the beneficial climate of Saranac Lake, Einstein’s favorite vacation spot. A concerned husband, Konenkov sent his wife there to rest. Soon Einstein arrived as well.

Now the lovers could be together far more often. They called their room the little nest. The things they gave each other they considered shared property, and they gave them a name made from the first letters of their names, Albert and Margarita: Almar. There was an Almar blanket, Almar armchairs, an Almar pipe.

In that room, Margarita washed the scientist’s famous mane of hair. After she left, Einstein struggled to do it himself. “I washed my own head, but without much success. I don’t have your skill or care,” he wrote to her.

“Everything here reminds me of you. ”

In 1945, when the Konenkovs could no longer remain in America, Sergei learned that his wife’s relationship with the famous scientist had crossed the line of friendship. Contrary to his usual forbearance, he staged a grand scandal. But the scandal did not stop Margarita.

She continued to meet Einstein until the very eve of her departure for the Soviet Union. Days before their parting, he gave her a pair of gold watches, which would be put up for auction at Sotheby’s at the end of the twentieth century, along with several letters from the lovers. Those letters would serve as the proof that Margarita and Albert had been bound by tender feelings. Until the correspondence came to light, a different impression had taken hold.

Many believed that Margarita had worked for the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, and that Einstein knew this perfectly well. She was accused of using her connections in American high society to obtain nuclear secrets for the USSR, especially since some photographs showed Margarita standing next to Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the American atomic bomb. Einstein knew everything, and he pitied her. He called the Soviet Union a coarsened homeland, and after Konenkova’s departure he wrote to Margarita, asking whether her “best employers” were bothering her.

He tried to help her as best he could, even agreeing to meet with Pavel Mikhailov, the deputy Soviet consul in New York, who hoped to exploit Einstein’s scientific connections. As it turned out, the meeting bore no fruit. Einstein refused to cooperate with the NKVD. When the Konenkovs prepared to return to the USSR, a whole ship was chartered by Stalin’s personal order to transport all of Sergei Timofeevich’s works.

Back in Moscow, the sculptor received a studio on Gorky Street for his complete personal use. No one else enjoyed such luxurious conditions. The envious elite immediately buried Konenkov under accusations: that the couple had sat out the war abroad, that they now received too much from the authorities. Exhausted by these attacks, Margarita wrote a letter to Beria himself, asking him to protect the family from unfounded attacks, given her services and her husband’s services to the motherland.

The correspondence between the former lovers continued for another ten years, until Einstein’s death in April 1955. His letters were sad; the author’s depression could be read in them. “Unlike me, you still have the possibility of several decades of active life and creativity,” he wrote. “I think of you often and wish with all my heart that you enter your new life with joy and courage.

”

The new life came soon enough. The fashionable dresses and high-society receptions vanished into the past. Margarita sank into household cares. The Konenkovs had no children; in her youth, she had been too afraid of ruining her magnificent figure.

After Konenkov died in 1971, Margarita was left completely alone. She stopped going out, avoided friends and relatives, lay in bed for weeks at a time, and grew very heavy. In 1980, fate gave the former beauty a terrible death: Margarita Konenkova died of exhaustion, simply refusing to take food. Nothing held her to this world anymore.

Everything lay in the past, and the present held only a carved box of documents, and inside it a sheet of paper with a poem, written not by the Nobel laureate and great physicist Albert Einstein, but by her beloved man.