The Goddess of Small Victories (5 page)

“Argumentum ad hominem. Your logic is inappropriate and your ethics unjust. If I used such low arguments, I would be thought a terrible lout.”

“Why don’t you put a little more coal on the fire.”

Kurt cast a suspicious glance at the coal-burning stove. It was a chore he hated. He opened the window wide.

“What are you doing? It’s cold enough to split rocks!”

“I’m hot. The air in this room is stuffy.”

“If I die of pneumonia, it’ll be your fault. Come here!”

He put down his shirt and lay next to me. We hid under the covers. He caressed my cheek.

“I like your birthmark.”

I caught his hand. “You’re the only one who does.”

Using two fingers, he traced a horizontal eight between my breasts.

“I read an interesting story about port-wine stains.”

I bit him gently.

“According to Chinese legend, birthmarks are passed down from previous lives. Therefore I must have made a mark on you in an earlier life so I’d be able to find you again in this one.”

“In other words, because I put up with you in a past life I’m doomed to put up with you in all subsequent ones?”

“That’s the conclusion I’ve come to.”

“And how will I recognize you?”

“I’ll always keep the windows open, even in winter.”

“Too many windows to inspect, it would be more sensible for me to leave a mark on you too.”

I bit him, not holding back this time. He howled.

“Pain is something we never forget, Kurtele.”

“Adele, you’re crazy!”

“Which one of us is crazier? Look how you disfigured me! I hope it was in my very last life! Because I don’t like the idea of having wandered around like this since the dawn of time.”

My hands won me forgiveness for the bite I’d given. I felt his body relax.

“Are you asleep?”

“I’m thinking. I have to go to work.”

“Already?”

“I have a present for you.”

Reaching under the bed for his document case, he produced two red, highly polished apples. With a knife, he had carved “220” on one and “284” on the other.

“Is it the number of our past lives? One of us has got a head start on the other.”

“I’ll eat ‘220,’ and you ‘284.’ ”

“You always choose the lighter one.”

“Hush, Adele. It’s an Arab custom. Both 220 and 284 are amicable numbers, magnificent numbers. Each is the sum of the factors of the other. The factors of 284 are 1, 2, 4, 71, and 142. Their sum is 220. And the factors of—”

“Enough, it’s all too romantic, darling toad, I’ll faint!”

“Only 42 pairs below 10,000,000 are known.”

“Stop, I’m begging you!”

“If an infinite number of them exist, no one has ever proved it. And a pair with an even and an uneven number has never been found.”

I stuffed the apple into his mouth. As I bit into mine, I was already nostalgic for this moment, for what we would never be again: beautiful, stupid children, alien to everything except each other. It was the most precious gift he ever gave me. I kept the seeds in a candy box from Café Demel.

The first time we’d embraced, a few months earlier, I’d been afraid that I would break him in two. After the massive, brushy torso of my first husband, I was unused to his brittle, hairless body. I didn’t initiate him into sexual matters, but I had to teach him about intimacy. At the start of our relations, sex was a release for him, a concession to biology. A detail to be addressed lest his mental acuity suffer.

Of course, I didn’t belong to his world. But intellectuals are men, after all, their desires are not in a separate compartment. On the contrary, Kurt and his friends were fierce in their desires, as though needing to take revenge. Their common hunger for the ideal could be assuaged only through the flesh. We girls were a reality they could palp.

He’d lost his virginity fairly young to an attractive older woman, a friend of the family. His mother, when the affair came to light, embarked on an intensive campaign to safeguard the family honor. Capital not to be frittered away on a girl without expectations. Marianne envisioned her son marrying a woman of a certain social standing—a comfortable union to cushion her precious offspring’s daily life. His wife would have a good education but no personal ambition, the necessary and sufficient basis for perpetuating—or, rather, providing roots for—this dynasty of petit bourgeois that had accumulated money through the ceaseless striving of Gödel senior. Kurt was forced to break off his liaison and took care afterward to hide his private life, developing a taste for secrecy. Several years after our meeting
at the Nachtfalter, his mother would learn of our relations and view them as an unfair punishment for a blameless life. Marianne never forgave me for Kurt’s duplicity, not recognizing, of course, that I had been its first victim.

In the winter of 1929, Frau Gödel was still happily unaware of my existence. Her husband having died, she had just moved to Vienna to be near her two sons. Kurt had to jump through hoops to find time for both his suspicious mother and his demanding mistress, while still keeping up with his course work at the university. Although a man who didn’t like to eat, he would have dinner at my house, then join his family for a late second dinner after the theater. He spent part of the night in our bed, ran off to his office at dawn, and then would suffer through long digestive walks in the Prater on his mother’s arm. How did he manage to survive? A rock would have cracked under the pressure. Yet he said himself that he had never worked as well. I didn’t understand that he was using himself up.

After wolfing down his “220,” Kurt jumped out of bed. He brushed his suit, polished his shoes, and checked every button on his clothing. The first time, before he’d explained to me the logic of his dressing-room choreography, I’d laughed. “Shirt buttons, always from the bottom up to avoid misalignment.” He put his left leg into his trousers first because he balanced better on his right and found it lessened the time he was unstable. It was the same for every moment of his life.

He slipped on his mussed shirt without grumbling. So it was true, he was going off to work. He would never appear in his mother’s drawing room looking slovenly. He had accounts with the best tailors in Vienna, he was that elegant. Marianne had little taste for the bohemian chic some students affected. She thought of her sons as display mannequins to advertise the
Gödels’ success. After all, textiles were in the family history. Her husband had risen from being foreman in a clothing factory to directing its operations. I tended to be a bit approximate. Despite all my pains, something in my outfit always fell short: a laddered stocking, an ill-fashioned cuff, an off-color pair of gloves. But my fresh-out-of-bed look was exciting enough to Kurt that he spared me his mania. For Kurt, everything assumed extreme proportions, but he applied his sartorial terrorism only to himself. What I had first thought was snobbishness or a bourgeois holdover was a necessity of survival. Kurt wore his suits to face the world. Without them, he had no body. He put back on the paraphernalia of a human being every morning, and it had to be impeccable since it advertised his normality. I later understood that he had so little faith in his mental balance that he laid a grid of ordinariness over his life: a normal outfit, a normal house, a normal life. And I was an ordinary woman.

“But it isn’t my birthday.” Adele hesitated to take off her cap. She didn’t want to expose her thinly thatched skull. Anna knelt down, pretending to search her bag for a mirror that she had already found. When she rose to her feet, Mrs. Gödel was wearing her present: a soft blue-gray turban.

“You’re beautiful, Adele! You look like Simone de Beauvoir. It goes with your eyes.”

The old lady looked at herself indulgently.

“You called me by my first name. I don’t have a problem with that. But please stop resorting to it according to circumstances. I’m not senile.”

She smoothed the tissue paper and folded it into a perfect square.

“Gladys is bound to tell me that it makes me look old.”

“Since when have you listened to the opinions of others?”

“You think she’s harmless, but she’s a nuisance. She paws through my belongings.”

“I think I’ve gotten the message.”

“Gladys is secretly venomous. Seeing too much of her can kill you in the long run. She went through three husbands.”

“She’s still on the prowl.”

“Some women never have enough.”

She wiped the mirror with her sleeve before giving it back to Anna.

“So, what is the price tag on your generosity? I wasn’t born yesterday, young lady. Presents are always attached to a cost.”

“It has nothing to do with the
Nachlass
. I’d like to ask you a personal question, if I may. I’ve been wondering … what you talked about with your husband.”

“You’re always so apologetic. It’s exhausting.”

Adele stored the folded paper in her bedside stand. Anna, not knowing what to do with her hands, tucked them between her thighs.

“What do your parents do?”

“They are both history professors.”

“Rivals?”

“Colleagues.”

“So your parents were intellectuals, but when they went for a walk on Sunday, I’m sure they held hands.”

“They talked to each other a lot.”

She listened calmly to her lie. Had she been honest, Anna would have replaced “talked to” with “shouted at.” They competed over everything, even their child. The lectures of one answered an argument by the other, when they weren’t fighting outright. They waited for their daughter to enter the university before signing a tacit truce. Each had staked out a separate territory, large enough to provide a field for her greatness and his. She, Rachel, went to Berkeley and the West Coast, while George, closer to home, scaled Harvard’s walls. Anna stayed on in Princeton, alone in a town she had always wanted to leave.

“How did they meet?”

“They were students.”

“Does it shock you that a woman like me ended up with a great mind like him?”

“I see great minds all around me, and I’m not impressed by them. But your husband is a legend, even among the great and the good. He was known to be unusually hermetic.”

“We were a couple. Don’t go digging beyond that.”

“And you talked about his work at the dinner table? Today I proved the possibility of space-time travel, would you pass the salt, darling?”

“Was that how it was at your house?”

“I didn’t have meals with my parents.”

“I see. A middle-class upbringing?”

“Prophylaxy.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I had an old-fashioned upbringing.”

Anna’s childhood was continually beset with domestic chaos, carefully kept behind padded doors. Dinners alone with the governess, private schools, dance and music lessons, smocked dresses, and a general inspection before being trotted out into company. Returning from parties where her mother had flitted around the room and her father had pontificated in a corner, she would curl up in the backseat of the car pretending to be asleep to avoid being asphyxiated by their conversation.

The young woman smiled bitterly, and Adele chose to examine her fingers.

Apparently satisfied, Adele said, “To be perfectly frank, at the start of our relation, I harassed him. I couldn’t stand to be left out. I had no access to the greater part of his life. But I had to learn my place. It wasn’t why I was there. It really was
beyond me, even if I didn’t want to admit it! And … we had other worries.”

Anna poured the old woman a glass of water for her dry mouth. Adele took it with a hesitant hand. She tried unsuccessfully to keep it from trembling.

“Kurt was searching for perfection and opposed to any idea of vulgarization. It implies a kind of compromise and inexactitude. What I know about his work I gleaned from others. I listened a great deal.”

“When did you realize how important he was?”

“Right away. He was a small star at the university.”

“Were you present at the birth of the incompleteness theorem?”

“Why? Are you planning to write a book?”

“I’d like to hear your version. The theorem became a kind of legend to a group of initiates.”

“It always made me laugh, all these people talking about that fucking theorem. The truth is, I would be surprised if even half of them understood it. And then there are the people who use it to demonstrate anything and everything! I know the limits to my understanding. And they are not due to laziness.”

“Don’t your limits make you angry?”

“Why fight something you can’t do anything about?”

“It doesn’t sound like you.”

“You think you know me already?”

“There’s more to you than you let on. But why me? Why do you let me come back and visit?”

“You didn’t hesitate to strike back at me. I hate condescension. And I like your mix of apologeticness and insolence. I’d like to find out what you’re hiding under that first-communion skirt of yours.”

Deftly, she tucked a stray lock of hair under her turban.

“Do you know what Albert used to say? Yes, Einstein was one of our friends. A conversation stopper, isn’t it? Ach! How he bored us with saying it!”

Anna leaned in so as not to miss a word.

“ ‘The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious.’ Of course, it can be understood as relating to faith. I read it differently. I’ve brushed up against mystery. Telling you the facts will never transmit the experience.”

“Tell it to me as a good story. I won’t write a report when I get back to the office. It has nothing to do with them. Just you and me, and a cup of tea.”

“I’d prefer a little bourbon.”

“It’s still daylight out.”

“Then a sip of sherry.”

AUGUST
1930

The Incompleteness Café

On my nights off, I waited for him outside the Café Reichsrat across from the university. It wasn’t my sort of café, being more for talking than drinking. The talk was always of rebuilding the world, a project I saw no need for. On that night the meeting was to focus on preparations for a study trip to Königsberg. I was perfectly happy not to be going, as a conference on the “epistemology of the exact sciences” was no sort of tryst. The days before the meeting, Kurt hummed with a particular, keen vibration. He was enthusiastic, a new state for him. He was in a hurry to present his work.