The Goddess of Small Victories (16 page)

The first goon flicked my husband’s hat off with his fingers. He was all of twenty years old and had a baby’s skin that must still have been his mother’s joy.

“Show a little respect, hey?”

My stomach knotted. I felt the group around us grow tighter.

“Not such a big shot when we step away from the blackboard, are we?”

“I don’t remember seeing you at any of my courses.”

The boy turned to his companions, reprising a scene they had acted out dozens of times.

“This guy hasn’t caught on. He thinks I might actually sit there for a course in Jewish science.”

At this point, the men I had previously known would have waded in with their fists despite the imbalance in numbers, but Kurt had the wild, staring eyes of a person strangled for air.

“He’s not Jewish, leave him alone!”

“Cat got his tongue? As well as his dick?”

He pinched me at the waist.

“Like to try a real man for once? What say, cutie?”

I pushed him away and grabbed my husband’s lifeless hand.

“We’re leaving, Kurt. Right now!”

A brown hedge formed in front of us.

“Not so fast, doll face! Big boy’s staying with us. We want to explain a few things to him.”

I’d fended off nightclub drunks for years. I wasn’t going to let these hoodlums intimidate me, whatever the color of their shirts. Sometimes all you have to do is show your teeth to make the pup creep back into his kennel.

“Get out of the way! You don’t scare me! You aren’t even fit to shine his shoes!”

Kurt tried to deflect the slap aimed at me. His glasses fell off, and he dropped to all fours looking for them, while the brownshirts sniggered. I realized they were going to start pummeling him, and I saw red. Acting on reflex, I lashed out with my umbrella, giving a few startled heads a passing thump. In the next instant I lifted Kurt to his feet and recovered his glasses. With our attackers momentarily stunned, we galloped down the stairs, not looking back to see if they were following. The rain sheeted down on us as I led Kurt quickly to the Café Landtmann, where we finally rested, out of breath, choosing the table farthest from the windows.

My senses registered every detail of the scene with crystal clarity: the smells of dampness and roasting coffee, the sound of tableware clinking, the pattering of the rain, the laughter of the kitchen workers. Kurt, soaked clear through, seemed spent. He fingered the cracked lenses of his eyeglasses with a nervous gesture that boded poorly.

The battle wasn’t over for me. I’d extricated him from a brawl untouched, now I had to rub out the psychic damage. The episode couldn’t have failed to remind him of the assassination of
his friend Moritz Schlick on those same stairs. I was much more frightened at the prospect of seeing him crack than at having to confront the Reich’s whole army with an umbrella.

I’d never counted on him to protect me. Making a show of his virility wasn’t among his concerns. He had never fought anything except the limits of his own thought. Until now he had even steered clear of any infighting over intellectual priority. The danger we’d just faced had brought home to him the full absurdity of the new order. He was unprepared to deal with outright stupidity. Nothing would come of subdued displays, it was time to bark like a dog. It wasn’t his moment. I needed to transform the incident into an anecdote where I came off as a doughty matron—anything but a heroine. We often spoke of the episode afterward. He would always praise my courage, knowing that he was also diminishing his own and casting himself forever in the role of castrated male. I couldn’t tell whether he was unfazed at looking like a weakling or preferred to hide his shame behind denial. For my part, I hadn’t been courageous, just acting on my survival instinct.

“They took me for a Jew. I don’t understand.”

“There’s nothing to understand. Those thugs were looking for a fight, they latched on to you the way they would have done to anyone else. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“The university is sending me a warning. They’re trying to frighten me.”

“That’s a total hallucination, and I won’t have you thinking like that! There is no plot against you! The Nazis put all intellectuals into the same basket. That’s all.”

He was shivering. I took his hands and made him keep them on the table.

“I can’t return to the university. They’ll be waiting for me.”

“It’s no use going back until you have your accreditation.”

“What is going to happen to me, Adele?”

I would have liked to hear him use the word “us.” Or to be asking the question myself and to be governed by his answer.

The waiter brought our order. I downed my cognac in one go and signaled for another. Kurt hadn’t touched his own. I decided that the moment had come for shock treatment.

“We need money. Now!”

“My mother is in desperate straits. My brother is already doing everything he possibly can. We’ll be able to use the draft from Princeton once the Foreign Exchange Service makes the funds available.”

“I’m talking about us, right now! You have to find work, Kurt. You have connections, put them to good use! You know people in manufacturing. I’m ready to go back to serving beer, but you need to do something too!”

“Work as an engineer? You’re crazy!”

“This is no moment to act the prima donna. We need a way out. You’re going to have to work!”

He choked on his brandy. Accepting a position outside the bosom of his alma mater had always struck him as laughable. Now that he was up against it, the prospect suffocated him.

“Then you need to accept the conditions laid down by the university.”

“I won’t kowtow to the Nazis.”

“Only temporarily, Kurt. Write to Veblen and Flexner right away! Ask them to get us a double visa.”

“I’ve already spoken to von Neumann about it. My Austrian papers are no longer valid, and the American immigration quota for Germans has already been met. They’re not accepting anyone else.”

“You’re not just anyone.”

I swigged my second cognac. An enormous task still lay ahead of me.

“Kurt, we have to leave Vienna.”

“You told me you never wanted to leave here.”

“There’s nothing to keep us any longer.”

“My mother has been trying to warn me of the danger for years. She understood before anyone else. It’s not surprising that she’s in so much trouble with the authorities in Brno.”

“It didn’t keep her from staying on.”

I could read his mind: If we had only listened to her last year, Adele, we wouldn’t be in our present fix. He had never thought seriously about emigrating, but it still provided a handy weapon in our little domestic war. The previous winter, I’d had a miscarriage before I could even tell him I was pregnant. He’d gone back to Princeton alone just two weeks after our wedding and returned in June. But making my confession at this stage would only earn me his retroactive reproaches. Anna, ever the optimist, had advised me not to let him go to the United States without telling him. She thought fatherhood might give him new strength. I decided not to try the experiment. In the end, my lie cost me only a bit of added loneliness and a few regrets.

I hadn’t seen Anna for months, or “Anna Sarah,” since all Jewish women in the Reich were forced after August 17, 1938, to add “Sarah” to their first name in official documents. She was hiding in the countryside at the home of her son’s wet nurse. Wagner-Jauregg hadn’t looked out for her after all.

“Finish up, Kurt. I’m going to call a car to take us home. There’s no point in running into those louts as we get off the tram.”

Kurt was caught in a true, proper bureaucratic double bind. Unless he declared his allegiance to the new order, he would
never be allowed to leave; but if he submitted to it, the universal draft would apply to him, voiding his visa. Kafka, Kurt’s countryman, would have appreciated the bad joke, but for the fact that the Nazis were already dancing on his grave in Prague. Kurt hoped his supposed heart condition might earn him an exemption, but in late summer 1939 he was declared fit for administrative service. He couldn’t make use of his “nervous condition” to avoid the draft. He even drew a veil of silence over his years of psychiatric treatment, because the American immigration services, flooded with applicants, would have denied his request on that basis. I now know that if we had made an official case for his “fragile mental state,” Kurt’s fate might have been far worse. In those days, your release pass from a psychiatric ward was also your ticket to a work camp.

The prospect of enlistment in the Wehrmacht was inconceivable to him. What would he be forced to do? Work out the logic of an imminent war? Become a white-collar murderer? He would have imploded. Outside his research, nothing meant a thing to him, but the rest of the universe had decided differently, shoving his nose into the sorry shit of history.

Since midnight, Anna had watched every flap of her radio alarm clock as it fell into place. At five thirty she sat up on the edge of her bed and rubbed her head until it hurt, tangling her hair further. The cat was mauling the bed frame. She made no move to stop it. She rose and cleared away last night’s television tray: a half-emptied bottle of wine, a yogurt, and a packet of crackers.
Unfuckable virgin
. She was still mulling over the old woman’s insult. As though she had a problem fucking.

She stayed a long time in the shower, increasing the temperature to the point where it was just bearable. She went back to bed in her bathrobe, her skin and hair still wet. Despite her torpor, she still couldn’t manage to sleep. She started caressing herself. The cat looked at her from the foot of the bed. She couldn’t concentrate. She got up and shut the peeping tom in the kitchen. She went back to caressing herself, summoning a memory that was guaranteed to work, even if it always left a lingering sense of unfinished business.

She is eighteen. She accompanies her father to a dinner at the Adamses’. She hasn’t seen Leo since that famous letter, which she still regrets sending. He never answered any of her subsequent
ones. At dinner he is distant and excuses himself before dessert. She slips away from the table to hide in the library. Leo comes into the room, locks the door, and without a word rams her up against the bookcase. She recognizes the stubborn look on his face—the same one he wears on the rare occasions when he loses at chess. He kisses her. His tongue, ineffective, tastes of bourbon. He has given himself courage. They’ve never kissed before. From a sense of competition over who would break down first and ask the other for a kiss. She wonders if she really feels like it. Because they are going to do it, this thing that will partition their memories. She would like to be transported. She isn’t. She has often imagined this scene: rough but elegant. Far from this awkward reality. They have the overfamiliarity of an old couple without the complicity to make up for it. She touches a man but still sees the child, the adolescent, the friend. The same smell, but stronger. The same mole on his cheek, but now under the shadow of a beard. Like a familiar song in a different key. Her mind fixes on the strangeness of it, keeping her from letting go. So she inventories what she has learned from others. She wants to do well. She runs her hand under his T-shirt, explores his warm skin, cooler toward his lower back. Her fingers drop toward his buttocks, which Leo clenches. She fumbles with the snap on his pants to release his penis. She fondles his hardened cock, noticing that up till now she has known only circumcised ones. Leo spreads her arms out, forcing her to be passive. She clings to the raw image of his glimpsed penis. She feels tiny between his gigantic hands. And finally the little boy disappears.

He fucks her standing, the silence punctuated by a ticktocking grandfather clock. The wooden molding digs into her back at every thrust. It’s an execution squad. He has to get his revenge. She has to settle an outstanding debt. The part of herself that is
excited by submission is not one she had known before. She feels her pleasure welling up too quickly. His strokes sync with the clock; she keeps herself from moaning, opens her eyes: he isn’t watching her come.

The anticipated orgasm radiated outward from her parts; she smiled—her little machine still worked. What happened afterward she preferred to forget. They had put their clothes back on and opened the door. Before leaving the room, Anna had asked for a word, a gesture of affection, but he had brushed her aside absently. “Wait, I have to jot something down and I’ll be right there.” She understood that if she chose to wait now, she would be supplicating for the rest of her life. Back in the kitchen, Ernestine, the governess, noticed her mussed clothes and gave her a quiet smile, taking her pallor for embarrassment. She left without saying goodbye to Leo and pretended to be indifferent when he called the next day.

She looked at her radio alarm clock: 6:05. Still a full hour before she could start her day. She reached over to her dressing table and took a novel haphazardly from the stack.

Her parents had almost been pleased by her taste for books. Something might be made of the girl yet. Of course, she’d never be as brilliant as the Adamses’ son. But at least she didn’t call them from the police station. Leo was probably the child they would have liked to have. Their hopes for her had been modest, and she had not disappointed. She didn’t even have the excuse that she was lazy: she worked hard, eager for the half smile that greeted every A, but there were never enough of them. It would have been hipper to have a dunce to bemoan. Still, at fourteen Anna spoke several languages. Her mother corrected her too-colloquial German, and her father thought her French and Italian barely adequate for ordering in a restaurant. The adolescent
buried her anger in little black notebooks, labeled by date and scrupulously aligned on the shelf in her room, describing the people around her in unvarnished terms. Since the day when Rachel had “inadvertently” read one of her notebooks, Anna had gotten into the habit of using the Gabelsberger shorthand that her grandmother had taught her for fun. She saved her rounded handwriting for her homework. At her graduation, her father looked at his watch, and her mother, in an offensively low-cut dress, eyed the male livestock. Among all these pimply youths, there had to be one who would take an interest in her daughter. Marriage might be a good solution: sometimes talent skipped a generation.