The Goddess of Small Victories (10 page)

I could never persuade him to tell me the story of those three days, but I know that they were extraordinarily painful. The few small details I obtained took years of prying. I’ll never know. I’ll never be him. Even today, I can only imagine his suffering: a man standing in front of a bed in the bad light of a hotel room.

I see him folding and unfolding his clothes to keep his hands busy. Washing them and drying them on towels embroidered with the pompous monogram of the Palace Hotel. Going down
to the dining room and ordering a meal he will never touch. The waitress is pretty. She smiles at him. He manages to say a few words to her in French. He returns to his room by the staircase in an attempt to measure time physically. He concentrates for a moment on the number of his room key looking for a sign. He opens and closes the door wondering if he is doing it for the last time, if he is taking off his jacket and sitting on this chair for the last time. He smells the faint trace of the room’s previous occupants lingering in the air. He reaches for his notebook, he opens and closes it, strokes the moleskin cover. He thinks back to the waitress’s smile. Immediately, he thinks of me, of our last meeting on the station platform. He can’t summon a distinct memory of my face. He says to himself: Strange how the most familiar things are sometimes impossible to describe. He thinks of Hans Hahn. He thinks of his father. Then he has an idea. Fleeting, it glides through his mind before vanishing into the depths: a carp on the surface of a turbid pond. There, in a chair that hurts his back, he sits quite still so as not to startle the thought. He doesn’t even try to open his notebook. He thinks that the thought is still possible, if he stays where he is and makes no motion. No disturbance to the muddy water. He remembers our last argument, my crude words, the kind you fling at a man like a slap in the face when he refuses even to breathe: “You’re a man, for Christ’s sake! Eat! Sleep! Fuck!” He doesn’t know how long he’s been in this chair. His back keeps a record of the passing hours, and he welcomes the pain. At dawn he shuts the window and packs his bag.

As someone who would spend his whole life committing suicide, he could have cut his suffering short right there in Paris. No one would have been there to stop him. But he came home to Vienna and checked in to the sanatorium of his own volition. Why he renounced death isn’t explained by my love for him, nor
by his mother’s love, nor by his faith. He must have been obeying another and far stronger injunction: the last struggle of his body against the anthropophagy of his mind.

Perhaps I am condemned to see duality where there is none.

One morning in January 1936, looking out through the clutter of my father’s shop window, I recognized Kurt’s brother on the sidewalk. I thought: Kurt is dead. Why else would Rudolf make the effort to contact me? Ever since Kurt’s disastrous return from Paris, I had lived in limbo. Kurt was in strict isolation at Purkersdorf, and even redheaded Anna could no longer help me see him. The meager information to be gotten from his nurses was far from reassuring. He refused to eat and, groggy from drugs, spent his days sleeping. I couldn’t face either of the two likely outcomes: that I would wait for a man who was locked away and had no hope of recovery, or that I would become a widow but without the right to wear mourning. I couldn’t even run away. I was just an onlooker at a train wreck.

I sat down and closed my eyes. I heard the shrill tinkling of the doorbell, then Rudolf’s solemn greeting to my father. I waited motionless for my sentence.

“Miss Porkert? Kurt wants to see you.”

Rudolf had gone to all the trouble of seeking me out: if Kurt wasn’t dead, he was not far from it.

“He isn’t well. He is refusing to eat anything. He thinks his doctors are trying to poison him. Would you accompany me to Purkersdorf? He needs you.”

My father said nothing, having long since abandoned hope of saving his wayward daughter. My sisters bustled around upstairs, whispering and gathering my belongings. My mother dressed me tenderly: the sudden intrusion of the bald truth into a place where it had long been unspoken left me limp as a rag doll. For
my family, Rudolf’s visit was proof of my importance to Kurt, this man about whom no one ever spoke, this ghost responsible for my disgrace.

Rudolf drove me in his car to the Purkersdorf Sanatorium. During the long, awkward silence I was able to recover my spirits. I watched him out of the corner of my eye: the Gödel brothers had little in common, unless it was the stiff sadness at their core. He waited until we’d reached the outskirts of Vienna to make a few bland comments. We skipped over “why” and “whose fault is it,” instead exchanging information and making arrangements. Words without emotion. Kurt would have approved the objective tenor of our conversation: who would stay with Kurt and on what days. I would be introduced to the medical team as a close friend of the family. We would avoid any scandal. There would be no commotion, we would disturb him in no way. We would try not to break the last delicate thread. We loved a different person.

Rudolf parked the car in front of the sanatorium. Despite the dirty winter light, the immaculate building displayed an insolent health. I had grown to hate its little geometric friezes, its imposing modernity, so powerless to dispel the patients’ troubled spirits.

Rudolf sat motionless, his gloved hands gripping the wheel tightly. Without looking at me, he managed to say the words that needed to be said: “I should have gone to meet him in Paris.”

I lightly touched his pale skin below the cuff of his leather glove. This man, too, was fragile, even if he didn’t show it. They are all fragile.

“It wouldn’t have changed anything. You know that.”

He stiffened at my touch. I lied badly: he should have gone to Paris to meet Kurt, but even before that he should never have let him go.

“We won’t say anything to my mother about your being here. Kurt is in no condition to manage this kind of situation.”

“I’m here for him. Don’t imagine that I consider this change of heart a victory of any sort.”

I waited for him to go around the car and open the door for me. This time I would walk in through the front door with my head held high.

His life, our love, the country’s future—everything was in confusion. I would have to straighten up this mess. I would have to bring order to his chaos if we were to ever have a future together. That’s the way I am: tell me that I’m needed and I’ll lift mountains.

The higher-ups at the retirement home denied Anna’s request to take Mrs. Gödel on an outing. A trip to the movies was out of the question, the staff barely managed to keep Mrs. Gödel’s pain under control. The old woman was living on borrowed time. Anna didn’t know how to break the bad news to her. She should never have made any promises. On top of everything, she’d fallen so far behind in her work that she’d had to cancel her last visit.

Arriving at the half-open door, Anna hesitated for a moment. The room was dark, the curtains pulled shut. The air was stale, the smell made her gorge rise. She composed her face into a smile before entering.

“I’m so sorry to be late, Adele. I ran into some problems on the way here.”

The shape buried under the covers made no answer.

“Were you asleep? I’m sorry.”

“I am tired of hearing you always apologize for the rain.”

Adele propped herself up laboriously on her pillows. Her mouth was drawn tight and her eyebrows arched querulously. Anna told herself she wouldn’t have the strength to clash swords
with Adele, not tonight, after all the people bothering her at work, the flat tire, and the pimple throbbing on her chin. The last of the evening light was long gone, she was already thinking of the lonely, winding road that would lead her back to an empty fridge.

“So what kind of behavior is this? You come every two days, then you don’t come anymore?”

“I was very busy at work.”

“I’m not in the mood to visit with you. We’re closed. No
Nachlass
on the
Nachlass
*
today!”

“Are you feeling unwell? Shall I call the duty nurse?”

“You don’t have anything better to do than to play the part of a bloodsucker?”

Anna guessed that Adele had learned she was confined to quarters and put her animosity down to that. Someone else had brought the news, but she would pay the price. She walked up to the bed holding out a bag of candies.

“I brought some sweets. We won’t tell the nurse.”

“You are trying to hurry up my death to get possession of those papers sooner?”

“I was hoping to make you happy. I know you have a sweet tooth, Adele!”

The old woman shook her finger at Anna. Her gestures and words rang false. She felt their dissonance without being able to correct them.

“Don’t talk to me as if I am a child!”

Anna had used up her stores of patience. She stared at the rejected bag of treats.

“At least if you had children, you wouldn’t be here buttering up an old lady to earn bucks.”

“You have much to teach me in many areas of life, but that certainly isn’t one of them!”

“
Bist deppert!
Idiot! Don’t take that tone with me!”

“Mrs. Gödel, I like you a lot. Please don’t ruin everything.”

“I want to have nothing to do with your so-called affection. It is playacting! Lies!”

“I always take pleasure in seeing you, Adele.”

“You don’t know pleasure. You are a big joyless lump, with those claws for hands. You reach for life with tongs, at a distance. I think you kiss with your mouth closed. Would you even know an orgasm? You probably excuse yourself in bed constantly. In fact, no. You aren’t even frigid. You are simply an unfuckable virgin!”

Unfairness always had a debilitating effect on Anna: it numbed her will. She felt herself turn to stone, the color drain from her face, and she knew that giving vent to her anger in turn would do her a world of good. Adele, suffering from congestion, was turning purple, which had to be bad for her ancient heart.

“
Raus!
Out! I’ve dealt with my full share of cripples in my lifetime.
Raus!
”

At the sounds of commotion, a nurse entered the room.

“Ah! That’s all we needed. For this one to come clomping in like a peasant from the fields!”

“Mrs. Gödel, I’m going to give you a sedative now. No more visits for the moment.”

Anna fled, leaving the sweets on the bed.

She rummaged in her bag for a handkerchief. The vending machine in the hallway beckoned. She sniffed, breathed deeply, and found some change: she’d earned a treat. That Gödel woman had a lot of juice for an old bag living on borrowed time. Anna stifled another round of tears. The crazy biddy could be so wounding.
You’ve won, you old witch! I won’t come back again!
Why should she subject herself to this kind of treatment? She
looked down at her trembling hands. “Claws”? Better not to dwell on the ugly things Adele had said. It wasn’t her fault if the authorities had turned down her request for an outing. And she was under no obligation to come and hold Adele’s kidney dish every day. She gobbled down the chocolate bar. Such a waste of time, all those useless visits. “Unfuckable virgin”? She hadn’t been a virgin since her seventeenth birthday. She was entirely average in that regard, she’d taken the plunge on the night of her prom with a boy called John. They’d both had too much to drink, and the experience—though disappointing—had allowed her to put the formality behind her. She remembered with more bitterness the corollary to this decision: her sudden and final break with her childhood friend Leonard Adams, who’d always thought that her virginity was his by right. They’d often talked about it: he would be gentle, and if he worked on his technique with other girls it was only so that she wouldn’t be disappointed. They’d been raised together, and they would grow old together. At fifteen Leo had already mapped out their way of life: his brilliant career, their house, their two children, and a home office where she could write whatever she wanted, because he had no doubt that she would be an artist. She hadn’t wanted to be his soul mate
by default
. She was more than a basic premise. So she’d chosen the chick magnet in her class to deflower her. Leo was in boarding school, and she had written him a detailed account of her adventure: he’d always favored her with a blow-by-blow account of his own conquests. She didn’t hear from him again for months. He was extremely touchy, and his prodigious memory helped him stockpile imagined slights. He could remind you years later of an innocent remark, analyzed to the last possible implication. He wasn’t about to forgive her for having cheated him of his due. “Joyless lump”? What did the old bat know about
it? Had she even touched a man since Pearl Harbor? Others had schooled Anna in the subtleties later. None of the boys who made it past her apparent severity had ever complained of her coldness. On the contrary, Anna had a hard time getting rid of the little warriors, who’d no sooner shot their bolt than they wanted to park their slippers at the foot of her bed.

Once again, she hadn’t seen it coming; she was always being had. Adele Gödel was another of those embittered women just waiting to unleash their bile.

A blob of glittering pink entered her field of vision. She sighed. Gladys would make a fitting coda to this disastrous day.

“So, you had a little argument?”

“News gets around fast.”

“Adele can be mercurial. But at least she doesn’t hold a grudge. You’ll remember next time.”

“Remember what?”

Gladys put her manicured, liver-spotted hands on her hips. Anna thought she looked all too much like an ad for a golden-years Barbie.

“Today was her birthday! She didn’t have any visitors. Except you, briefly. And it’s probably going to be her last. About that, she has no illusions.”

The young woman felt herself flooded with a familiar sensation of guilt. How could she, usually so meticulous, have overlooked the date? She knew what would happen next: in another two minutes, she would start to find excuses for Adele, and a minute after that, she would look for ways to be forgiven.