The Goddess of Small Victories (8 page)

Anna responded impulsively, regretting it even as she spoke.

“What if I asked for permission to take you to the movies?”

“I am adding you this minute to my will! My huge and unfortunate backside has been Scotch-taped to reality far too long.”

The young woman started to think of all the difficulties entailed by her offer. She poured a second shot of bourbon into her lukewarm cup.

“I didn’t destroy those papers, Anna. But don’t think I am telling you this because you offered to take me for an outing. I am not one of those fast women!”

“Nor am I, Adele. Nor am I.”

The old lady smacked her lips.

“What good movies are around at this moment?”

“
Manhattan
is playing. A black-and-white film by the New York director Woody Allen.”

“I’ve heard of him. He is too intellectual for me. It feels as if my whole life has been spent in a black-and-white film. A silent film, almost! Great God Almighty, I want a Technicolor screen! With music! Why does Hollywood not make musicals anymore?”

“I’m not that fond of musicals, to tell you the truth.”

“Too popular for you? Her Majesty prefers
French
films, I suppose.”

“Where do you get the right to judge me?”

“Poor thing. I was judged all my life. Stupid, vulgar, inept. Never up to the mark. I cried, I kicked against those closed doors, but I was always ‘that Austrian woman.’ Princeton was not my world. One day I said
‘Scheisse!
’ Shit! I stuck a pink flamingo in the middle of our garden. Can you imagine people’s reaction? A pink flamingo at the house of Kurt Gödel … It made his mother swallow her string of pearls. And it did me a world of good. I like musical comedy. I like love songs and paintings with pretty colors. I don’t read.
And you can all go to hell!
If you want to see depressing films or have a little drink before sunset, Anna, you are free to do it. What counts is joy. Joy!”

“What did your husband think of the pink flamingo?”

“Did he even know we had a garden?”

1933

Separation

With the complicity of the nurse, I was able to visit Kurt during the months of his first stay in the sanatorium despite his family’s disapproval. Anna was the daughter of Russian immigrants. Her parents, who were household servants, had followed their masters in flight from the Bolshevik menace. She had married for love a Viennese clockmaker with a store on the Kohlmarkt, a few steps from the Café Demel. Her parents-in-law, strict Catholics, never accepted their son’s choice of a Jewish bride. When the clockmaker died of tuberculosis shortly after a son was born, Anna was left with a small child on her hands and a senile father. It was a miracle that she had found the job at Purkersdorf, where she lived in a tiny maid’s room. Her salary barely covered the cost of a wet nurse for her son and hospice care for her father. She saw the boy, Peter, only once a month, riding her bicycle far out into the countryside to visit him. She often showed me photographs of her little man, who had his mother’s red hair and, presumably, his father’s dark eyes. Anna masked her Russian accent
under a thick Viennese brogue, but she couldn’t hide her Slavic origins: she had a round face with strong cheekbones and pale eyes pulled into a permanent smile. Her flaming and unruly hair stood out a mile away; she never passed unnoticed. I’d forbidden her to dye her hair blond, as I envied the luxuriant thatch she had such trouble keeping under her white cap. Her life was far more difficult than mine, yet she never complained. She knew how to listen and asked for nothing in return. Our acquaintance was too slight for me to be dishonest with her. After every meeting with Kurt I would run and hide behind the building to cry, bemoaning my fate and my inability to help. He was so thin, so weak. Anna would roll cigarettes for me and wipe my mascara-streaked cheeks without comment. Only once did she give me advice: “If their drugs really worked, we’d know it. It’s not a secret. What your man truly needs is love. You’re going to have to reach down and deliver, sweetie.”

I visited every day, waiting for hours by the service entrance to spend a few minutes alone with Kurt. The Gödels knew about our furtive meetings, as my man had no talent for deception, but they’d been unable to derail what they took for little more than a passing fancy, which was to be swept away, along with the whole sorry business, by denial.

When Kurt recovered a semblance of health, his mother sent him to a spa across the border in Yugoslavia for a rest cure. I fretted in Vienna all summer. Kurt came back in excellent form and newly confident in his future: he had been recruited by Oswald Veblen, the mathematician, to give a series of lectures at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study.

The IAS had been founded four years earlier by a wealthy philanthropist, Louis Bamberger, and his sister. They had sold their chain of department stores to Macy’s a few days before the
stock market crash of 1929 and used the proceeds to start a foundation dedicated to pure research. The times were ripe for poaching from European universities—the intelligentsia were climbing all over each other to get out the door and reach America safely. A newly minted doctor of sciences in Vienna was entitled to only the unpaid position of
Privatdozent
. Kurt refused to consider working in the private sector as an engineer; the idea made him laugh—when it didn’t make him sick. Aside from recognition, the invitation from the United States offered him a path to a brilliant academic career and true financial independence. Its cost would be our separation.

Princeton was an opportunity not to be missed. It was a world tailored to his measure and one where they spoke his language. He was so excited at the prospect of going! I had my doubts, I’ll admit. Crossing the Atlantic was a long and exhausting trip, even for a passenger on the upper decks. How was he to survive this exile when a trifle could send him spiraling into anxiety? How was he to negotiate this unfamiliar country and its people? How would he stand the uncertainty, when what he dreaded most was a break in his routine?

He had promised to return. He had asked me not to cry. To wait. What else had I done all these years? Telegrams were expensive, and letters traveled by boat. Waiting was all I had left. Yet we had already survived a far greater separation, the distance between a genius and a dancer.

I finished my shift a little before midnight. I ushered the last of the drinkers out into the street and lowered the blinds, hung my dirndl on a hanger, and retouched my face powder in the light of the bar. Too old to dance, not old enough to give up the life. If you had told me five years earlier that I would one day be serving beer in a traditional costume, I’d have mocked you for a false
prophet and lifted my skirts in your face. But times had changed, and I’d given up my room and my independence. My father now escorted me home from work: the streets had grown that dangerous. A rotting Vienna was loosing its nighttime farts, erupting in public brawls and political violence whose sense escaped me. The political strife had just come to a head in Germany and would soon arrive in Austria. Some had already chosen their camp. Lieesa was drawn to the Heimwehr’s Catholic militias, which, given her lightskirt past, was slightly ironic. Other carousing friends of mine gave up nightlife for politics and joined the Socialist Schutzbund militia. All were puppets. None of the successive coalition governments managed to stave off the ravages of the Great Depression. The tension in the streets was escalating, fanned by the Nazis: there were threats of a general strike and a German invasion. Chancellor Dollfuss had resumed control of the country by steamrolling every form of opposition, on the right as well as the left. He was in sole control of a sinking ship.

Nothing now stood in the way of the Nazis taking power. They wouldn’t burn down our parliament as they had burned the Reichstag. There was no parliament. From the border came rumors of a new order. Soon they would be here burning books, banning music, closing the cafés, and turning off the lights in Vienna.

My father was late that night. In my anxiety, I reread Kurt’s letter for the hundredth time. I lived in suspense between his letters, comforted by their regularity, disappointed by their coldness. Hating their author sometimes, never for long. Tearing up at imaginary signs of love, worrying over every line—half mother and half lover. Was he sleeping enough? Was he thinking of me? Was he being faithful? He seemed happy, but how long
would it last? How many days before he pulled the curtains shut? Did he have a stomachache or a headache? I was looking without admitting it for early signs of a relapse in every overly neutral statement. So as not to miss it this time.

Princeton, October 10, 1933

Dear Adele
,

In your last letter you asked for some particulars about Princeton and the surrounding area. I have had no time at all to engage in tourism. But here, to forestall your reproaches, is a brief description
.

Princeton is a university village in the greater suburbs of New York. The trip into the city is exhausting. To get from the university to the isolated little station at Princeton Junction, you have to take the “Dinky,” an uncomfortable shuttle. The commuter train then takes two hours, and you arrive at Pennsylvania Station, which is located at Seventh Avenue and 31st Street in Manhattan, to emerge at an intersection on Broadway that is dizzying with lights and noise. So it is unnecessary to ask me “not to traipse around New York every night.” I have neither the stamina nor the desire to do so
.

I am quite satisfied, on the other hand, with the IAS. The program is very ambitious and recruitment has been everything that Oswald Veblen and Abraham Flexner, the director, hoped for. They have assembled the cream of today’s scientific community. They even managed to attract Herr Einstein. Not bad considering that all of America was clamoring for him. I am not impressionable, but meeting him was an unforgettable experience. We spoke for more than an hour about philosophy and hardly even touched on mathematics or physics. He claims that he is too poor a mathematician! You would enjoy this
great man and his humor. Do you know what he says about Princeton? “It’s a wonderful little spot, a quaint and ceremonious village of puny demigods on stilts.”

I am just a lecturer on temporary appointment, and I envy the first resident scholars: von Neumann, Weyl, and Morse. Freed of any obligation to teach, their only assignment is to think. No one cares what you do as long as you look busy
.

Princeton is charming in the fall. You would hate its flame-colored forests and impeccable lawns, girl of nighttime Vienna that you are. For its first academic year the IAS is being housed in the university’s Fine Hall, a temporary arrangement. The buildings are acceptable, and Americans have a remarkable sense of hygiene. I am preparing my next course of lectures: “On the Undecidability of Propositions in Formal Mathematical Systems.” I’ll spare you the details, though an obscure exposition has never put you off! You’ll be glad to know that my work is at last being warmly received
.

My days are very full. I am a sort of emeritus professor during the day and a solitary student at night. My interactions with colleagues are cordial but, all in all, quite limited. I miss the cafés of Vienna. Mrs. Veblen sees to my social life and invites me to teas and musical evenings
.

I am flabbergasted by the amount of food that people eat. Everything is huge: a typical steak might last me a week, a dry martini would fill a bathtub. I would be ill if I did not watch what I ate very carefully. I also monitor my temperature. I take long walks in the open air every day
.

I will not be in Vienna for your birthday. We will make up for it when I get back. What would you like me to bring you from New York? I have very little time to spend on this kind of project, but I can commission the wife of one of my colleagues. America makes so many exotic things that would appeal to your curiosity. Some music,
perhaps? I have heard strange compositions here that you, I am quite sure, would find delightful
.