The Goddess of Small Victories (30 page)

Anna resisted the temptation to smoke, although the cigarette after a movie was one of her favorites. Mrs. Gödel looked dreamily at the poster for
The Shining
. The young woman stiffened—she was determined not to go twice on an expedition like this.

“It’s a horror movie, Adele.”

“Even mummies have the right to be scared! You know, I could have met this fellow Kubrick if Kurt had ever stepped away from his blackboard for even a minute.”

Anna forgot about her watch.

“Mr. Kubrick was writing a screenplay about artificial intelligence, or space travel, I don’t remember exactly. Kurt never answered his letters, and Kubrick, who lived in London, refused to travel! The two of them were obviously never meant to meet.”

“Kurt Gödel in the credits for a science fiction film! I have a friend who would love that story. He’s obsessed with
2001: A Space Odyssey
. I never managed to watch it all the way through.”

Adele squashed her cigarette end with the tip of her cane.

“As I understand it, you must have missed quite a number of end credits. And who is this friend you are talking about?”

DECEMBER
5, 1947

So Help Me God!

“Where are they? We’re late!”

“It’s less than a half hour to Trenton. You’re more nervous than you were before your thesis defense, Kurtele.”

“This is an important day. We mustn’t make a bad impression.”

A pale yellow automobile drove up the street and honked, drawing to a stop at our feet. Morgenstern was behind the wheel, and Albert’s bushy head emerged from the passenger side.

“How elegant you look, Adele! You are a credit to your new country.”

I turned in place to allow myself to be admired: a coat embroidered with chenille, kid gloves, and a black cap.

“You might have worn a tie, Herr Einstein.”

“Gödel, whatever J. Edgar Hoover may think, I have been an American citizen since 1940. I’ve earned the right to walk around wearing what I like. I intended to go in a bathrobe, but Oskar vetoed the plan.”

Kurt blanched in retrospective horror. Given his contempt for propriety, Albert could perfectly well have done it. Morgenstern invited us into his car. His tall, tweed-clad figure clashed with the bohemianism of his illustrious passenger. We sat in the backseat of the sedan. The trip had the slightly festive feel of a students’ outing. Only Kurt was tense. He had asked his two closest friends to stand in as character witnesses at the ceremony. Seven years after our arrival in the United States, we were applying for citizenship. A model student to the marrow, my husband had been preparing for the exam for months. Although Oskar had told him that the effort was unnecessary, he had applied himself to studying the history of the United States, the text of the Constitution, and local and state politics down to their tiniest details. He quizzed me every night at dinner, less concerned about whether I would pass than about my enthusiasm for the subject. I had even had to learn the names of the Indian tribes. Thanks to his pathological need for perfection, he had every answer down.

“So, Gödel, have you studied properly?”

Einstein was enjoying his younger colleague’s anxiety. After all these years, he still took pleasure in playing with Kurt’s nerves. Oskar, who had often had to pick up the pieces, was concerned to keep his friend in a good frame of mind.

“You know how thorough he is, Professor. Gödel could point out a thing or two to a doctor in Constitutional law. Which is not the point of the interview. The exam is a formality, not a thesis presentation. You do agree with me, don’t you?”

“I’ll answer any questions they put to me.”

“Right. Just the questions.”

“And if they ask me about it, Herr Einstein, I’ll have to tell the truth. I’ve found a flaw in the Constitution!”

I smiled at seeing both men stiffen.

“No, no, and no, Gödel!”

“It strikes me as pertinent! The American Constitution has procedural limits but no fundamental ones. Consequently, it could be used to reverse the Constitution itself.”

Albert turned in exasperation toward the backseat and barked at my husband’s obdurate face.

“By the hair on God’s chin, Gödel! No one in this car doubts the acuity of your logical thinking. But you do realize that criticizing the American Constitution to an American judge will make him less likely to grant you American citizenship!”

“Don’t get excited, Herr Einstein. Think of your heart.”

Albert drummed exasperatedly on the teak dashboard. He was avoiding smoking on account of his sensitive friend. Kurt was a rotten student in the logic of common sense. Furthermore, he hated being wrong, whatever the subject. I had made my choice: to be an irreproachable member of a community of sheep, you have to become a sheep yourself. At least for a few minutes. For his part, he refused to submit without a quibble to this humiliating exercise where he had to surrender his intelligence to the law, though he was completely unable to mobilize his talents for the public good. Unlike Albert, his rebellion never surfaced outside the realm of theory.

“You may be right. At least in appearance.”

“Be diplomatic! That’s all we ask of you. And for Christ’s sake, roll up that window.”

“The exam is dead simple, Gödel. They are going to ask you about the color of the American flag and things of that sort.”

“Ask him a difficult question, gentlemen! My husband loves to play games when he is sure of winning.”

Kurt closed his window and settled against the backrest.

“I’m waiting.”

“On what day do we celebrate Independence?”

“Harder. I’m not in kindergarten.”

“I know! On the Fourth of July. We celebrate our freedom from British subjugation.”

“One point for Adele. Who was the first president of the United States?”

Kurt listed the presidents in chronological order from George Washington to Harry Truman. He could have given the date they entered office and the length of their terms. Einstein cut him off before he launched on a detailed biography of each.

“Who will be our next president?”

My husband thought he had missed a fact. I jumped in, happy to lighten the mood.

“John Wayne!”

“An actor for president? What a strange idea, Adele!”

“Did you see
They Were Expendable
? I adored that movie.”

“Let’s stay serious. You should ask my wife questions about how the government is organized. There are gaps in her knowledge of the legislature. Speaking of which—”

“Enough, Gödel. What are the thirteen original states, Adele?”

I recited my catechism, but with the slightest hesitation. Kurt leapt at the chance to prove how tenuous my knowledge was. This was a kind of fact I never stored in my memory for more
than a few weeks. I didn’t like to burden myself with useless baggage. Kurt had been working at mental retention since he was a toddler. Fortunately, Albert came to my rescue.

“Adele, why did the pilgrims leave Europe?”

“Because of taxes?”

“Possibly. British cooking would have been enough to make me run away.”

“To practice their religion freely. You really have no respect for anything.”

“Don’t be such a Puritan, my friend. You’re not yet an American citizen.”

Albert questioned Kurt about the basic tenets of the Declaration of Independence. It was a piece of cake. He had learned the text by heart and explained the beauty of it to me. Then I was questioned about the basic rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly—values that the black years in Vienna had made us forget. I had not made use of any of them since arriving in America, not even the most exotic freedom: the right to own a gun.

“How many times can a senator be reelected?”

“Until he is mummified?”

“Correct. But formulate your answer more appropriately, Adele.”

“One last question for the road. Where is the White House?”

“At 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.”

“You’re a walking disaster, Gödel. My next present to you will be a muzzle!”

“I don’t know as much as he does.”

“Don’t worry. By tonight, you will be an American citizen.”

An American. Who could have imagined that one day I would give up my nationality, my language, and my memories
to petition a foreign government for naturalization? I watched the tidy streets of Princeton flash by as I thought of the streets and roads I had traveled for seven months across a dying Europe.

I had hared around in every direction to visit my family and to bring reassurance to Kurt’s, helping them to the extent that we could. I had knocked on Lieesa’s parents’ door. Her father had not recognized me. He claimed never to have had a daughter, but at the sight of a few dollars his memory returned. Lieesa had left Vienna in the wake of the Nazi troops. She’d gotten knocked up by a German officer. His whore of a daughter had probably wound up in a ditch, her ass in the air, the way she’d spent most of her life. I took a taxi to Purkersdorf without much hope. The sanatorium was still standing; the war had brought to its doors a fresh quota of loonies. The surviving staff had had no news of Anna since she had left to be with her son, and no one had her address. I made inquiries at the Red Cross and the American relief organizations, but in vain. The bureaucracies were in chaos. Who had time for a cabaret dancer and a redheaded nurse when thousands were mourning the loss of their loved ones? I lit two candles for them at the Peterskirche. Across the street, the Nachtfalter was still in business. Now it catered to GIs looking for distraction. Other dancers would try their luck with them. Lieesa had backed the wrong horse. Anna had never had the wherewithal to place a bet.

It was my responsibility to sell our Viennese apartment as well as to get damages for the villa in Brno that had been requisitioned during the war—a further bureaucratic puzzle. After years of anxious isolation, the activity brought me back to life, but my compatriots’ distress was a constant agony. Vienna had been ravaged by the Allied bombing—even its historic center, where the Opera had been destroyed by fire. The arrival of the Soviets in
April 1945 had provoked an orgy of violence in the way of rapes, fires, and looting. The dying city, which had no police force and no water, gas, or electricity, experienced a second wave of pillagers shortly afterward, this one native. American troops had rejoined the Red Army, and the two forces were now quarreling over the last shreds of my blood-drained city.

Einstein was right, the world of yesterday, the world I longed for, no longer existed.
²⁴
What would stand in for hearth and home going forward was America. Yet I had left Princeton in the spring thinking I might not come back.
Après moi, le déluge
. I was sick of Kurt’s insufferable routines. I was tired of having to drag my mattress to the bottom of the abyss to catch his fall. I was exhausted from exile and loneliness. I wanted to go home.

The hypothesis of freedom is more important than its actual use. America had taught me this lesson in pragmatic democracy: don’t give people a choice, give them the possibility of choosing. The potential to choose is all we need. Few of us could stand the dizzy prospect of pure freedom. By letting me go, my husband made sure that I would come back. On the trip out, standing on the deck of the
Marine Flasher
, I became myself again, far from our domestic monastery. I experienced those first days on my own as a resurgence of youth, and I was happy to be so small amid such vastness.

Quickly, though, my thoughts returned to Kurt. Had he been aboard he would have howled from the cold. I’d have had to round up every last unused blanket on the sundeck. And he would have hated the menu. He would have avoided the other passengers, who all talked too much, whereas I found their mediocrity restful. Then I fell prey to the inevitable insomnia:
Now he has just come home from work. Has he eaten?
I hadn’t reached Bremen, and already I was no longer my own master.

The car stopped in front of the New Jersey State Capitol, a stone structure very much in the European tradition. The paradox would normally have made me smile, but I had a lump in my throat. Kurt had infected me with his anxiety. We went upstairs to the courtroom. A dozen or so people were waiting in the large space. Each candidate had to be interviewed privately by the judge, who, on seeing Albert, came over to say hello, ignoring the next man in line.

“Professor Einstein! To what do we owe the honor of your visit?”

“Judge Forman! Such a coincidence! I am accompanying my friends Kurt and Adele Gödel, who have come for their interview.”

The judge gave us barely a glance.

“How are you? We haven’t seen each other in ages.”

“Time flies so fast these days.”

“Well, then, who will go first?”

I took a step back. I wasn’t prepared for this undemocratic cutting in line.

“Women and children first! Philip Forman gave me my interview when I came to be naturalized. You’re in good hands, Adele.”

I followed the judge into his chambers, tortured by the violent urge to urinate. He took exception neither to my jumpiness nor to my still atrocious accent, for I emerged a few minutes later with my valuable prize. He was probably impatient to talk to Herr Einstein. He had asked me a few very simple questions and nodded vacantly at my answers. I returned to my little group clutching the form. Waiving protocol, the judge invited Oskar and Albert to accompany Kurt into his office. He must have been terribly bored; the prospect of spending a few minutes with our illustrious companion brightened his day.