The Goddess of Small Victories (11 page)

1936

The Worst Year of My Life

Rudolf had gone ahead into his brother’s room. I was waiting my turn, sitting next to the mathematician Oskar Morgenstern, a close friend of Kurt’s to whom I’d never previously been introduced. While he couldn’t possibly have believed that I was “a close friend of the family,” he accepted the information blandly. Kurt, with his boundless capacity for suspicion, had told me that I could trust this good and phlegmatic man entirely.

“How is our patient, Miss Porkert? At our last meeting, he seemed so weak.”

“When they weighed him yesterday morning, he had reached one hundred and seventeen pounds. The doctor has set the bar for his release at one hundred and twenty-eight.”

I hardly dared to whisper; the elegance of the sanatorium’s lobby still intimidated me. Anna had told me lots of stories about the prominent Viennese figures who had stayed there. Gustav
Mahler, Arnold Schönberg, and Arthur Schnitzler had come for a spell of luxurious rest, along with maharanis and millionaires of every nationality. Before the crash, of course! In 1936, the desperate rich were growing scarce, at Purkersdorf as well as in Vienna’s nightspots.

The austere sophistication of the décor tired my eyes. The architect, a certain Josef Hoffmann, had an unhealthy liking for checkerboard patterns. They appeared in the wall friezes, floor tiles, window frames, doorways, and even the hard-backed chairs in which I bided so much time. The façade, too, continued the rhythmic pattern of the window openings, which were divided into small squares. I have always needed softness and would have found comfort in neither the sanatorium’s Spartan rooms nor its severely geometrical gardens. The place was perfect for Kurt, however: clean, silent, and orderly. And Morgenstern, an elegant man who was reputed to be an illegitimate scion of the German imperial family, seemed perfectly at ease in this too-vertical world.

“You have been a great help to him, Fräulein. Kurt has told me as much. He is not a man to display his emotions.”

Oskar Morgenstern clasped my hands warmly in his, the one time in our interactions when this man actually touched me.

“Did you know that he has started working again? I brought along some recent articles that might interest him, especially those by a young English mathematician, Alan Turing.”

He could see that I was uncomfortable but mistook the reason.

“I didn’t mean to intrude on your private relations.”

“We’re not allowed to bring him documents anymore. Someone who meant well smuggled in a letter from a certain German scientist, and Kurt stopped eating again for days. He became convinced that his work was being dismissed. And he interpreted it as a plot to keep him locked up indefinitely.”

“A man named Gentzen tried to disprove him, but Kurt’s theorems survived. His detractors hang on to Hilbert as to their mother’s breast. Turing’s work will interest him much more.”

“His reading is very carefully screened. We have instructions not to give him any books, or even pencil and paper.”

“That’s idiotic! To keep Gödel from working is to keep him from breathing.”

This was exactly my experience, too. Work was a life buoy as well as an anchor for my man. I looked over my shoulder to see if Rudolf was around. Kurt needed staunch friends, and Morgenstern seemed trustworthy.

“We’ve reached an agreement. I smuggle his belongings in to him as long as he keeps putting on weight. If he gets carried away, I confiscate his toys.”

The shock on Morgenstern’s face didn’t surprise me.

“You think it’s crude, but there was no alternative. Being force-fed and doped up on medication was destroying him. He deserves to have some semblance of control over his life.”

“Does Rudolf know?”

“He looks the other way. And he can tell that his brother is improving.”

“It’s wonderful that he’s working again. Has he mentioned what he is working on?”

I could hear no condescension in his question, I had been elevated from the role of bimbo to that of nurse. The promotion was welcome enough, even if I deserved a more official title. Still, I hesitated. How much could I trust him? Kurt had banged on so often about his colleagues’ jealousy.

“I’ve heard him talk about the first problem.”

“Of Hilbert’s program? Cantor’s continuum hypothesis? Is he still trying to show that it’s consistent?”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“Of course. Hilbert’s first problem. Kurt spoke of his ambitions at a talk in Princeton. The very import of his choice of research strikes me … But I’m straying from the point, I apologize. Here comes Rudolf, I’ll just go in and say hello to Kurt and then he’s all yours.”

I put my hand on his arm. “Herr Morgenstern? What is this program of Hilbert’s and what about it is worrying?”

“The subject is a complicated one.”

“I’ve been with Kurt for a long time now, and I’m used to not understanding everything.”

“Hilbert’s program is a list of tasks that twentieth-century mathematicians should accomplish. A series of questions that need to be resolved to shore up a portion of existing mathematics. Kurt has already partially settled the second question with his incompleteness theorem.”

“Then why is it a cause of worry to him?”

“Of Hilbert’s twenty-three problems, seventeen at least are still unanswered. Kurt has shown us that some certainties are forever out of reach. But as to which ones …”

“He could spend his life on it, and for nothing?”

“If anyone has a chance of resolving Hilbert’s first problem, it is certainly Kurt!”

“And the other problems?”

“If he had ten lifetimes it still wouldn’t be enough. In fact, I doubt they’ll ever be entirely solved.”

“That’s the sort of thought that haunts him.”

“Not at all! Don’t you see? Our friend enjoys the voyage more than the destination. You’ve made the right choice, Fräulein Porkert.”

He rose, leaving his seat to Rudolf, who collapsed into the unaccommodating chair, risking his back.

“The nurse can barely keep from throttling him.”

“Don’t let it upset you. He’ll have better days.”

Kurt’s brother buried himself in his newspaper. He sat up, cursed, and held up a page dated June 23.

“Listen to what this despicable ‘Dr. Austriacus’ has written in the
Schönere Zukunft
. He hasn’t even got the courage to sign his name to this garbage.”

He read the article from the progovernment Catholic newspaper in a low voice. I leaned in to catch the drift: “The Jew is inherently antimetaphysical. In philosophy, he embraces logicism, mathematicism, formalism, and positivism—characteristics that Schlick possessed in abundance. It is to be hoped that Schlick’s gruesome assassination at the University of Vienna will hasten the discovery of a truly satisfactory solution to the Jewish problem.”

He threw the newspaper into the wastebasket.

“What a rag! This will destroy Kurt.”

That’s how I heard the news: Moritz Schlick had just been killed on the steps of the university by an anti-Semitic student. Schlick, a philosopher and founding member of the Vienna Circle, was more than Kurt’s professor, he was his mentor and friend. How would Kurt take his death, coming so soon after Hahn’s?

“Hans Nelböck, Schlick’s killer, studied mathematics at the same time as my brother, and he also lived on the Lange Gasse.”

I shuddered. I, too, lived on that street.

“They didn’t know each other. But Kurt and I were his neighbors, our paths must have crossed at some point.”

“These madmen are destroying the last remnants of intelligent life in Vienna. The Nazis jumble together positivists, logic, mathematics, and Jews even if the whole thing makes no sense.
Kurt is going to have trouble too, I’m certain of it. As soon as he’s on his feet again, I’m going to advise him to leave the city. Morgenstern has told me that he’s putting his affairs in order. He’ll be on the boat soon.”

“Kurt is in no condition to travel, Herr Gödel.”

“None of these people are going to forget him immediately. Their ideas are short, but their memories are long.”

“He’s had very little contact with the university these last months.”

“Nelböck received treatment at a number of psychiatric clinics. One way my brother might react to these events is to see him as his dark doppelgänger. It might be better to say nothing about this for the moment. What do you think, Fräulein Porkert?”

I was not accustomed to giving Rudolf advice. Yet I was becoming a key figure in the mix. If Kurt was finally recovering his health, it was thanks to my ministrations.

“He has his own way of interpreting things, especially those you try to keep from him. And lying always entails more lying.”

“Will you handle it, then?”

I caught sight of Anna crossing the lobby. She signaled discreetly that she was going to the back door for a cigarette. I decided to join her, needing a jolt of friendship to calm my long-suffering nerves. No sooner was he himself again than his family was already planning to send him far away from me. Anna couldn’t persuade his doctor to talk them out of it all by herself, but it was worth a try.

“I’ll do it,” she said. “It’s still too early to send him away.”

We had to keep the terrible news from undermining his recent progress. I had seen a fragile man set off for Princeton and return a shadow of himself. In the months after his journey back from Paris alone, Kurt had stopped eating. He weighed under
one hundred pounds, and only my voice was sometimes able to rouse him from lethargy.

I had no training and no official standing, but I listened to the advice of redheaded Anna, and she’d seen plenty of others fall apart. I gave it everything I had: my sense of joy, of beauty. I opened the curtains to let in air and sunlight when the doctors imprisoned him in the dark cage of sleep. I had his gramophone delivered when they were recommending silence. I brought in the first flowers of spring. I spoke to him, without a break, when he was withdrawing further and further into himself. I lied about the state of the world, lied while reading the newspaper, lied about my own happiness. I talked to him about the early-summer fruits that we would eat together, about the lovely light that once again bathed Vienna, about the sounds of children in the Prater, about sweet Anna and her adorable carrot-haired son. I talked to him about the sea, which Anna and her son had never seen any more than we had, and how we would all go see it together. I consoled him, scolded him, blackmailed him the way you would a child. I fed him, spoonful by spoonful. I touched his body, so changed from the body I had desired, with neither pity nor disgust. I listened to his ravings, tasted each of his foods, again and again, to prove that no one was trying to kill him. I kept my counsel about the one thing that was true: that he was poisoning himself.

I accepted his weakness, his self-pity, his entreaties, his disrespect, followed by his anger, which always brought the first words to his lips. Weak as he was, his mental powers suffered, and it weakened him further to see his mind in decline. His mind had been a scalpel, a perfect tool, and he was afraid of its becoming a dull knife. He was a magnificent but ever-so-fragile precision instrument. I cleaned his moving parts as well as I could.
But the mechanism still refused to work. Though he was only thirty, he had the soul of an old man. He would say, “Mathematical genius is for the young.” Was he already past the age when insight strikes? That was the real question. He preferred silence to mediocrity. I had no answer to that, and no remedy for it, but having to choose between two poisons, I brought him his notebooks. I cried over it. I hated myself. But I saw no other possibility. I had to supply opium to an addict, to relieve him and intoxicate him at the same time. His doctor, Wagner-Jauregg, did something similar, inoculating his paralytic patients with malaria to rouse them from catalepsy. Evil to banish evil. What would the good doctor not have tried if I hadn’t made the choice I did? Electricity? Perpetual seclusion? I have heard time and again that mathematics leads to madness. If only it were that simple! Mathematics didn’t drive my man to madness—it saved him from himself, and it killed him.

Before going up to his room, I fished the newspaper out of the wastebasket and clipped the theater listings. It would give me something to discuss while I spoon-fed him his pap.

Sitting on his bed, a doctor with graying temples fingered Kurt’s wrist while consulting his watch. He looked me over with open and insulting lubricity. Kurt straightened up. I sat beside my man and waited for the doctor to leave before producing the clipping.

“Your idol has flown, Kurtele. Maria Cebotari is now singing at the Berlin Opera.”

She scratched at the door again; no immediate answer. Adele had responded neither to her contrite letter nor to the expensive gift accompanying it. Anna’s anger had swung from the old woman to herself and back without really finding a target. She should never have trusted her too-sudden intimacy with Adele. She thought back to the maple tree. She had been overconfident; she’d imagined herself becoming indispensable. Unfuckable virgin. The words still stuck in her craw.

“
Kommen Sie rein!
” Come in!

She entered the lavender-scented room on tiptoe. Mrs. Gödel, freshly powdered and perfumed, had spruced herself up. “Anna, I am happy to see you.” A failure of memory was unlikely; she had apparently decided to act as though nothing had happened. “Dear child, I recognized your timid little knock. Now, as you like to poke your nose into other people’s business, I’ve prepared a few crumbs for you.”

The young woman squared her shoulders; Adele hadn’t forgotten everything. A truce was acceptable. She slid her coat off while Adele opened a translucent envelope with careful gestures. “Where did I put my glasses?” Anna brought them to her
docilely. Adele patted the blanket. “Come sit next to me. These are some mementos I set aside before I was moved here.” Anna felt her resentment melt away as she looked at the first photograph: an old-fashioned snapshot of two little boys posing, the younger of whom was Kurt. Rudolf was holding a hoop; Kurt carried a doll. Still a toddler, he wore a shift.