The Goddess of Small Victories (15 page)

No one beyond a few misty-eyed dreamers like my father could still be misled by the Nazis’ posturing. Hitler would not stop at Austria or the Sudetenland. War was about to break out in Europe. On March 12, 1938, the Austrians welcomed the Germans as if they were distant relatives coming back into the fold. They might be a bit frightening, but they carried armloads of gifts. The Germans organized handouts of food to the neediest and promised to extend the social security network to all Austrians. They also promised payments to the unemployed and vacations to schoolchildren. The war over, we woke up with a major hangover and buried our shame under geraniums and furniture polish. When a new referendum was ordered by the Nazis, workers and bourgeois alike jumped at the chance to sit in their German uncle’s lap. He might have rapacious jaws and wandering hands, but his wallet was well stuffed.

Marianne Gödel had warned us in vain. The more clear-sighted among Kurt’s Jewish friends were already gone. I was blind and married to a man who was deaf. Giving in to my own panic would have dragged Kurt down into a deep and crippling anxiety. My job was to smooth things over. A minority was still sounding the alarm, but I belonged to the silent majority. How do you go against the current of history when your comfort and your hopes for personal fulfillment are not in any way altered by that current?

I can’t lie: I saw the broken shop windows, the families kneeling in the gutter, the abuse of the elderly, the street arrests. Like all the others, I reacted as though bobbing in a whirlpool where, to keep from drowning, you think of yourself first.

I’d asked Anna if I was making a mistake in not accompanying my future husband to America.

She simply shrugged. “I can’t tell the future, sweet cakes. What does your guy say about it?”

“Everyone is moving there. You should think about it yourself, Anna.”

“With what money? And how am I going to feed my son over there? I’m not going to start streetwalking in New York just to get away from these German hicks! Anyway, America is only for the rich.”

“Your Dr. Freud has left the country.”

“Then there will be plenty of work for us here.”

“My mother-in-law says the Nazis are going to eliminate the Jews.”

“So you have nothing to worry about. You aren’t Jewish. And I’ll be fine. They won’t come looking for me in Purk! Anyway, Wagner-Jauregg has always kept an eye out for me. And my kid is staying with good people. They would never rat him out.”

On April 10, the referendum ballots were inscribed with two circles: a big one for Yes and a tiny one for No. As if that weren’t enough, Nazi officials inspected every ballot as the voters emerged from the polling booth, passing the paper from hand to hand. The Reich had guaranteed itself an overwhelming majority in a rigged election. A staggering 99.75 percent of Austrians voted Yes. I did the same, then went and barricaded myself in our apartment in Grinzing. That evening, the news of the outcome would set off extraordinary violence in the streets. Kurt worked in the silence of his study. I touched his shoulder lightly. He emerged from his dream to say, “Adele, did you find any coffee? Yesterday’s was just terrible.”

The receptionist, a phone wedged to one ear and a tooth-marked pencil behind the other, motioned her to wait. Anna used the time to sign the register. She was surprised to notice that Adele had another visitor: Elizabeth Glinka, who had been the Gödels’ live-in registered nurse. Anna nibbled on the stub of a fingernail. Might she impose, or should she make herself scarce, as a courtesy? She’d have liked to meet this woman who had witnessed the Gödels’ last years together.

“I’m sorry, Miss Roth. No one is allowed to visit Mrs. Gödel today.”

“But I see that she has a visitor.”

“That person is waiting in the lobby.”

“Did something happen to Adele?”

The receptionist righted her coffee cup, which was tilting dangerously, and answered with a prim expression, “I’m afraid the information can only be given to a family member.”

“Mrs. Gödel has no family.”

The woman frowned. Her fingers, deprived of nicotine, worried at the already mauled pencil.

“She had a bad night. The doctor on duty didn’t like her chances this morning.”

Anna’s heart started racing. “Is she conscious?”

“She’s very weak. The best thing for her is to avoid any excitement.”

“I’m going to leave you my telephone number. Would you call me if there are any developments?”

“I’ll put the word out. Everybody likes you here. It’s so unusual for a young person to spend any time with our residents.”

Anna walked away in a daze. She’d known that Adele was in poor health, but the older woman had always seemed to have inexhaustible vitality. She couldn’t die like this. They had parted with bitter words. Anna had been short with her and felt responsible for the elderly woman’s sudden decline.

Too tired to retrace her steps immediately, she dropped into a Naugahyde chair. Nearby a woman in her sixties was knitting. Her hair haphazardly blow-dried, the visitor gave Anna a big smile. She had a hard face, but her brown, heavy-lidded eyes radiated an unmistakable kindness. Anna couldn’t tell whether the glow was meant for her specifically or for the world in general.

The woman stopped her rhythmic clicking and stowed her knitting away in a patchwork bag before coming to sit next to Anna. She held out a firm hand. “Elizabeth Glinka.”

“Anna Roth. I’m delighted to meet you. Although the circumstances …”

“Don’t worry. Mrs. Gödel has been through worse.”

She tilted her head, examining Anna with frank curiosity. The young woman sat straighter.

“Can I call you Anna? Adele has often spoken about you. She’s right. You’re pretty and you don’t know it.”

“That’s just the kind of compliment Adele would give.”

Elizabeth placed her calloused hand on hers. “It’s a good thing, what you’re doing for her.”

Anna felt a twinge of guilt. Their relationship was still ambiguous. She hadn’t made clear to herself where her interest ended and her affection began. Mrs. Gödel might have complained to her old nurse about their last discussion.

“Originally, I came to her with a specific goal in mind.”

“But you came back.”

“Have they told you anything?”

“She suffered a small stroke last night. It wasn’t the first. She’s let herself go into decline since her husband’s death. It’s over, she no longer wants to live.”

“Have you known the Gödels a long time?”

“I became their nurse full-time in 1973. Their gardener was a friend of mine, and one thing led to another …”

Reality flooded in through Anna’s locked doors. Tears welled up and her vision blurred. It was easier for her to cry over an unknown old lady than to summon the courage to say her final goodbyes to her grandmother.

Elizabeth pulled a clean handkerchief from her bag and handed it to her. “Adele hates crying. Just think what she’d say if she saw you.”

The young woman blew her nose and tried to smile.

“The end is not far off, but it won’t be today,” said Elizabeth.

From her bluntness, Anna guessed she was telling the truth. It would be too cruel for the Gödels’ nurse to lie to her just to make her feel better.

“I have a lot of affection for Adele,” said Elizabeth. “I hope she’ll slip away quietly, in her sleep. Without suffering. She’s
earned that much. Even if she wasn’t always so easy to deal with! She had her moments. You must have noticed?”

Anna shuddered at the nurse’s use of the past tense, but she couldn’t keep from nudging the conversation toward the object of her quest. She berated herself for her lack of compassion.

“Did you talk with Mr. Gödel?”

“He didn’t exactly talk much! A nice man, though. Except when he wandered off the deep end …”

Mrs. Glinka examined her out of the corner of her eye. Her scruples were a matter of principle, but she, too, needed to confide.

“It wasn’t exactly a state secret that Mr. Gödel was a special case. Adele had to watch him day and night. When I was hired to help out, she seemed at the end of her rope. She had put on a lot of weight. She was struggling with the aftereffects of her first stroke. She had serious problems with high blood pressure and arthritis. Her joints were swollen from bursitis, and she was a wreck. She couldn’t cook or garden. It depressed her to be so useless. She was stuck in a wheelchair, and he couldn’t look after her. He couldn’t even look after himself! She worried so much about him that she neglected her own treatment. But what can you do? As far as she was concerned, he took precedence over everything, including her own health.”

“Didn’t he die while his wife was in the hospital?”

“Just after she got out. The poor woman had no choice, we made her go in. Her life was in danger but she refused to leave him. He would stop eating when she wasn’t there! I shuttled back and forth between them, knowing all along that it was too late. He wasn’t answering the door anymore, even for me. I would leave his food on the stoop. Most of the time he wouldn’t touch it.”

“With her gone, he let himself die?”

“He would have died long before if she hadn’t taken such good care of him. She carried him for years.”

Anna folded the handkerchief. “I’ll give this back to you another time.”

She hoped that that other time wouldn’t also be the last, at Adele’s funeral.

“In spite of all he put her through, I’ve never seen a closer couple. I’m surprised she’s outlived him as long as she has. I gave her a couple of months, if that. With nobody to look after, she had no reason to go on. She was lost. In fact, she’d forgotten how to fill out a check!”

“I thought she took care of everything.”

“Mr. Gödel sometimes had crazy ideas. Toward the end, he was convinced that she was spending money wildly behind his back. As if Adele could have done anything like that when she was tending him night and day! As if he had any money to waste! What a tragedy! Thirty years of living in that house, more than forty years of living with her man, and then one day, poof … She’s alone and headed for the hospital.”

“Did you help her pack up Linden Lane?”

“It took us five days to sort through the basement. Piles and piles of paper! She was always stopping and looking at photographs or reading old notes. Just scribbled bits, for the most part. We put everything in boxes except for a few letters.”

Anna refrained from asking, “Where are the goddamn archives?” Elizabeth knew well enough that she was interested in the documents.

“She cried, poor woman. She muttered in German, and I didn’t understand much. She tore her hair out. I thought she was going to have a fit.”

“Who were the letters from?”

“From her in-laws. None of them liked her much. It was pretty obvious what kinds of things they were saying about her.”

“And what did she do with the letters?”

“She burned them! How else could she express her feelings?”

1939

Adele’s Umbrella

It was raining over Vienna. I paced the university lobby taking care not to slip on the muddy marble. I’d been driven from the inner courtyard by the braying and heavy stomping of a few bored youths. Those colonnaded precincts had previously heard only mannerly whispering. Bygone masters, modeled in stone, looked down on the brownshirts, who were spoiling for a fight with anyone who had the gall to meet their gaze.

Kurt finally appeared at the top of the grand staircase. I gave him a small wave but he made no response. Tonight was going to be hard sledding. His face was drawn and a vertical line marked his forehead. I was still not used to it. He’d brought it back from America, where he’d grown embittered. Kurt, too, was getting older. He struggled reluctantly into his damp coat.

“It’s been confirmed. My license has been suspended. I can’t
teach any more courses. I didn’t obtain permission for my last stint at Princeton. That’s why they summoned me back.”

“It’s a lie, they were properly notified.”

“We are now under Berlin’s control. The university is being reorganized. They are going to suppress the position of
Privatdozent
. I’ve been told to make a formal application to the Ministry of Education as a ‘lecturer of the new order.’ ”

“Fuck the new order, a total cock-up is what it is!”

“Don’t be vulgar, Adele. Please.”

“You know what this means, don’t you?”

Looking into space, he buttoned up his coat absently, mismatching the buttonholes. I took over the job from him while he stood there motionless.

“I have to find a solution, otherwise I won’t be able to return to Princeton.”

“The threat is a lot more serious than not being able to travel! You won’t be able to avoid the draft anymore.”

“You’re always imagining the worst. I’m still an eminent member of this university. I have certain rights, it’s just that …”

“You seemed so sure of yourself this morning.”

“My thesis adviser was Hahn. The new administration is getting rid of anyone suspected of having relations with Jews or liberals.”

“That’s outrageous! Especially as you’re completely apolitical.”

“If I join up with the university again under their conditions, they’ll have me on a leash. I would have to beg them for permission to travel. My work would be screened and subject to their approval. It’s out of the question.”

“And without their approval, you can’t leave. It’s a trap!”

“It’s just a show of power.”

My outbursts must have attracted attention because a group of brownshirts approached us.

“Let’s go, it’s dangerous here.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Adele! I’m in my own university.”

We had barely reached the door when the first ruffian hailed us: “Hey, Jewboy! Taking blondie for a walk?”

Kurt squeezed my arm until it hurt. I’d never seen him confronted by direct aggression.

“Sir, you’re speaking out of turn.”

I rolled my eyes. What world did he live in? It was pointless, not to say stupid, to respond to this kind of provocation.