The Goddess of Small Victories (12 page)

“Here is my
kleine Herr Warum
, my little Mr. Why.”

“I would love to see a photograph of you as a child.”

“We left Vienna so quickly. When I came back after the war, everything had disappeared.”

“You must have been a very joyful girl!”

The old lady scratched her head under her turban. The edges had already discolored, the delicate blue shifting to a yellowish gray.

“I was the eldest of three Porkert sisters, Liesl, Elizabeth, and Adele—a terrible trio! What a racket we made! My father called me his ‘stubborn little mule.’ ”

Anna held back the comment on the tip of her tongue. She wasn’t sure whether she’d won back the right to be ironic.

“I was born at the wrong time. The girls today have all sorts of opportunities. We were so … imprisoned. Every freedom cost us so much. And also, we had experienced so many wars. We lived in fear of seeing our men go to the front. Even my husband. He had diplomas all over the place, and they still called him fit for service!”

“Did you immigrate to the United States so he wouldn’t be drafted?”

“We were waging battles on many fronts, my sweet.”

Anna went on to another snapshot. The kind word slipped by Adele into her sentence had affected her too strongly. She was not going to forget her humiliation because of a small trace
of affection. She chose a tiny print in which Adele stood in a groom’s uniform against the backdrop of a theater curtain. She was holding hands with a man in blackface.

“The only remnant of my brilliant career as a dancer. It was hardly classical ballet. More like pantomime!”

“An era when people of color were not welcome in the theater.”

“The first time I ever saw a black man, I was getting off the boat in San Francisco in 1940. Even in Vienna’s nightclubs, I never met any.”

“Billie Holiday told the story that she was not considered black enough at first to sing jazz. She used to darken her face with makeup. Strange period.”

“Strange fruit.
Ach!
Billie … America was not all bad. When I arrived here, the music really helped me. Except for bebop, which I couldn’t stomach. What was that man’s name? Charlie Parker! He used to make me dizzy. Students were crazy about him. They compared his noise to Bach, to mathematics. I never saw the connection. In any case, Bach always made me feel depressed.”

“Did you go to nightclubs with your husband?”

“With Kurt! You are surely joking? He hated crowds and noise! No, I listened to singers on the radio. Ella, Sarah … I particularly liked Lady Day. Even if I didn’t understand all the words. Do you remember that song, ‘Easy to Remember but So Hard to Forget’?”

“Old photographs are probably not good for you, Adele.”

“I don’t look at them often. No point, I have it all here.”

Pushed by her finger, her turban came unstuck from the side of her head, and a rancid odor wafted into the room. Anna breathed through her mouth. The smell of Adele’s body mixed with the familiar smell of lavender troubled her. Her birthday
present, a bottle of her grandmother’s favorite perfume, had been liberally applied. From her nostalgia, Anna realized it had been a mistake to choose the perfume of a departed loved one as a gift.

“That one, if I remember correctly, is from 1939, a little before we left.”

“You were terribly blond.”

“You have never dyed your hair. It’s not your style.
Mein Gott!
The pain I endured getting my hair dyed! It was the fashion. Look at those boobs! I was still trim in my forties! At that time, women my age were already in the garbage can.”

The Adele who looked out in black and white wore a dark-colored dress suit with muttonchop sleeves, a low neckline, and a skirt that was gored below the knees. Next to her, looking straight ahead, stood Kurt squarely, his raincoat open to reveal an impeccable suit.

“I had my old brolly tucked under my arm. Someday I’ll tell you about that umbrella.”

“You were looking away from the camera.”

“Adele the Egyptian, always in profile. Adele the invalid, always half a woman.”

Anna spread the photos over the bedspread. A lifetime appeared in relentless fast-forward: Adele put on weight; Kurt seemed to shrink inside his suits. They ended up looking like those pairs of birds whose name she couldn’t remember. She picked a snapshot at random. Against the backdrop of a ship’s rigging, Mr. Gödel stood like an old man, his back bent.

“Were you on the boat coming to the States?”

“I don’t like that picture, forget it. Look at this one of our wedding anniversary. We were having dinner at the Empire State Building.”

“You were dressed to the nines! Who took the photograph?”

“The local professional, probably. The one who harasses you with a big sales pitch. Thirty years later you are happy that you fell for it.”

“Nice hat!”

“I bought it on Madison Avenue. It was an extravagance; we were so hard up. But I made a scene. After ten years of housework, I had earned it.”

“You were happy.”

“This one is a wonderful souvenir. It was 1949, we had just moved into Linden Lane. Finally we had a real home!”

“It’s rare to see him smile like that.”

“Kurt was not expansive with his emotions.”

“You had a lot of courage. You lived an absolute life.”

“You’re very naïve! On the scale of a person’s life, the absolute is the consequence of many small renunciations.”

“I was in high school when my parents divorced. Renunciation was not in their career plans.”

Adele gathered the photographs and tried to put them in order, eventually giving up. She rested her hand on Anna’s thigh. “At a certain age, you must learn to pay the bill yourself, sweetheart.”

Anna got to her feet; Adele’s words had struck her with the force of a ruler, as though she’d been thwacked on the back to straighten her posture. In her low moments, Anna thought she would have preferred to be an unwanted child. She knew better, even wringing all the romanticism out of her family mythology. She had no cause for bitterness over that. She wasn’t the furtive offshoot of a tussle in the backseat of a Buick but the natural outcome of a sincere mutual affection. George, a smart-looking doctoral candidate, had met Rachel, the only scion of an old, well-to-do family, at a history department reception for new
students at Princeton. The girl was shivering, the boy lent her his sweater. She had been impressed by his convertible and his Beacon Street accent. He had admired her Hollywood-goddess body and her still reasonable determination. He had telephoned her the next day. She presented him to her family. They had married, learned to hate their differences after originally loving them, betrayed each other first for the sport of it, then out of habit, and at last parted stormily. Anna was fourteen.

“Well within Gaussian norms,” said Leo, trying to comfort her when the divorce was announced. Pretentious metaphors came as profusely to the budding genius as the hairs on his chin were scarce. He’d started at an early age to draw up the bill he’d eventually present to his progenitors. Anna had little with which to reproach her own parents. They had hired competent governesses for her and sent her to unimpeachable schools. Her family had never endured a crisis that builds character and later gives you a history. No revelations of incest, no alcoholism or suicide. Her parents didn’t even suffer from a healthy middle-class neurosis. Disillusion wasn’t fashionable enough. They benefited in their thirties from the postwar economic boom and in their forties from the loosening of social mores. The ghosts of the Holocaust remained shut within the apartment of grandmother Josepha. She was alone in remembering the dead. If Josepha dared bring up the topic at the dinner table, the subject was quickly changed. Anna couldn’t blame her parents for dropping off their luggage at the baggage check. They had wanted to live.

“You’re very thoughtful, young lady.”

“I was thinking of the Gaussian curve. It’s a representation of the statistical mean.”

“You’re not going to start talking to me about mathematics, are you?”

“It shows that the features of a set’s elements tend to be distributed along a bell-shaped curve. The average values form the bump, the majority. The higher and lower values, by contrast, are relatively fewer in number. Like the distribution of IQ in a given population.”

“I’ve sat through my share of discussions of this kind.”

“You’ve broken beyond Gauss’s law, Adele. Beyond normal law. You’ve had an exceptional fate.”

“As I’ve already told you, Anna, every gift comes with a price.”

1937

The Pact

Halfway up the hill to the cemetery, I felt my stocking slither down my leg. Readjusting it, I caught a snag. I was late. I would arrive in front of his mother disheveled and sweating after I’d wasted my time picking out the right clothes for our meeting. I didn’t have much to lose, but I was still nervous. If she’d decided to put an end to our affair, why hadn’t she laid down the law to Kurt before leaving Vienna and returning to Brno? Before finally allowing us our chance to live together.

So what did she want from me? She openly suspected me of having a child hidden somewhere, as Kurt had confessed. This I found particularly galling. She couldn’t accuse me of having designs on the family fortune at this stage, the crash having made precarious inroads on their wealth. The older brother, Rudolf, a radiologist in Vienna, was the Gödels’ real source of financial support. Kurt was still a long way from earning enough for our needs, even if I’d always managed to get by on very little. She
must have realized that I now belonged within the family circle, whether the issue was Kurt’s multiple relapses or her own run-ins with authority. About Marianne’s courage, at least, I was not in any doubt: she broadcast her disgust for the Nazis loud and clear, with total disregard for caution.

Her card arrived out of the blue: Frau Marianne Gödel wished to speak to me, in private, in a quiet place. In plain speech, she wanted to see me without Kurt. I had never previously had the honor of meeting her, though Kurt and I had been together for ten years. I sent her a letter in reply, which I drafted and redrafted a dozen times, proposing that we meet at the Café Sacher, next to the opera house—this was intended as an allusion to her love of music and as a gesture of goodwill. She returned a curt note saying that she would require a quieter setting. Most likely she didn’t want to be seen in public with me. I suggested the Grinzing cemetery instead, near the grave of Gustav Mahler.

This irony was not calculated to put her in a good mood, and I expected no less from her. She had refused point-blank to visit our house. I had held out to her the advantage of seeing her son’s cozy living arrangements in Grinzing firsthand. We lived right next to the last stop on the 38 line, so Kurt only had to catch the tram below the university to make the commute home. All the greenery was good for his health. The celebrated Dr. Freud had a country house in this quiet suburb—we were in respectable company. My grudges against her had been accumulating for some time, but the temptation to meet the
liebe Mama
with all her many talents—incomparable hostess, accomplished musician, attentive mother—was irresistible.

She waited, stiff and forbidding, by the gray marble gravestone. With no word of greeting, she inspected me from headstall to hooves.

“Mahler’s daughter, who died at the age of five, is buried with him.”

“Would you feel more comfortable sitting? There is a bench on the other side of the alley.”

She swept away my suggestion with an imperial gesture.

“You don’t understand maternal anxiety, Fräulein. When Kurt was eight, I believed I would lose him to rheumatic fever. Not a minute has passed since his birth that I have not been afraid for him.”

Since I could not claim this experience myself, the contest went to her. She made the most of it. I stifled my mounting anger.

“Kurt has always been very attached to me. Do you know that when he was five, my son howled and rolled on the ground when I left the room?”

I bit my tongue. As a distraction from the painful introduction, I examined the woman closely. In any case, she hadn’t called me there simply to give an account of her motherhood—it was a postulate of her system, as Kurt would have said.

I had met Rudolf, who was elegant and had piercing, light-colored eyes and a small, sweet bald spot. Marianne I had never seen before, even in a photograph. I searched the features of the goddess-mother for the traits I loved in my man. She was fiftyish. Her inquisitor’s eyes were hooded behind drooping lids. Her gaze was at once startled and vigilant, and of frightening and unmistakable intelligence. The waking double of her son’s sleepwalking gaze. Her mouth was still beautiful, though the corners sagged with bitterness. Unless she’d been born with this hermetic smile. She seemed wary rather than disagreeable, corseted by her middle-class education and the very high idea she held of her progeny’s fate. The nose was perhaps the one feature they shared.

“Princeton has again made my son a very interesting offer. He declined several earlier proposals. This one is exceptional, but, regrettably, he refuses to leave you. The atmosphere in Vienna is very disturbing to him. You should persuade him to emigrate, taking you with him if need be.”

“Why should I? My family is here. Our life is here.”

“You are terribly naïve. Italy will abandon Austria, it is only a matter of months. This city will become a madhouse and the Germans will be welcomed with open arms. You must leave. And quickly!”

“We are not Jews, nor are we Communists. We have nothing to fear.”

“Everyone should be afraid of the Germans. How can I let my son pay allegiance to the Nazis and give instruction to a band of barbarians? All his Jewish friends have left the country. Without them, he can do nothing worthwhile. No scientist or artist worthy of the name will accept the Nazis’ authority. As far as I’m concerned, Vienna is already dead.”