The Goddess of Small Victories (19 page)

Sayonara! (
it means “goodbye” in Japanese
),

Adele

The little girl would never reach Pennsylvania, I was convinced of it, just as I knew that my letters were useless. I wrote them to revive my optimism, which our long journey had dampened. I’d left all my loved ones behind. I had prepared myself for the pain of it, but I was discovering the added loss of giving up my daily routine: the comfort of eating my favorite foods, of opening the window and seeing a familiar landscape. The one thing I had left was Kurt, in all his weakness. I’d built my life around a single person. I still don’t know whether it was a proof of love or of total idiocy. How can two people survive on a partially gnawed bone?

VIA RADIO-AUSTRIA NO. 40278

SAN FRANCISCO. USA. MARCH 5, 1940

TO THE ATTENTION OF

DR. RUDOLF GOEDEL

LERCHENFELDERSTR. 81. VIENNA
.

LANDED YESTERDAY IN SAN FRANCISCO. BOTH HEALTHY. TELL MOTHER AND PORKERT FAMILY. MANY KISSES. ADELE AND KURT
.

March 6, 1940

San Francisco

Dear Ones
,

We are finally in San Francisco, thinner but relieved … Our crossing of the Pacific was uneventful. After the darkness of Russia, the blue and green landscapes of Hawaii, where we stopped briefly, looked to us like paradise. My dream is to return there for a longer visit! I have been feeling landsick all day. The ground is still rolling as the boat did. It is very cool here. One of the passengers boasted of the California sun, but the fog in San Francisco puts Vienna in October to shame! Kurt has started to cough and complain about his chest. He lost a lot of weight during the trip. Once the endless formalities at customs were over, I dragged him forcibly into a restaurant. We ate a whole cow between us! The meat here is excellent. I’ll hardly have any time to visit the city, as we take a train tonight for New York. We are in a hurry to get there! It’s not true that I’m relieved, because I think of you all the time. We’ve reached safety, but your fate still seems uncertain. I long for your news. I long for Vienna. As soon as I get to New York I’ll wire you our address on the chance that telegrams to Europe are still getting through
.

A thousand kisses from the other side of the world
,

Adele

The coastline of America loomed before us at the last moment. A band of fog hid the city. All the passengers crowded on deck. Someone laughingly called out, “Land ho!” Someone else looked for the Statue of Liberty. Kurt patiently explained that we were making landfall on the United States west coast. New York harbor was still three thousand miles away. The man didn’t listen.
He was happy. Then we were caught up in the bustle: the shouts, the lowered gangplank, the impatient porters. A few lucky passengers found open arms awaiting them. We disembarked knowing that nowhere in the sparse crowd would we see the face of a friend. We held tightly to each other.

For safekeeping, I had hidden our visas, vaccination certificates, and other documents in my girdle. I’d slept with them ever since Berlin. All the same, I was extremely anxious going through immigration. When the officer, following routine, asked Kurt whether he had ever been treated for mental illness, Kurt looked at him blandly and said no. So he knew how to lie. Then we testified that we had no intention of becoming American citizens. There, he was lying to me: he had already decided that he never wanted to go back to Europe. He had crossed out that life with a careful and deliberate line. End of proof.

We found ourselves walking down Mission Street, haggard and not daring to smile or even look at each other for fear that we would be called back at the last moment. And then the sun rose over San Francisco. My stomach unknotted. Suddenly I was overcome with hunger, an end-of-the-world hunger. We rushed into the first restaurant with a vaguely European menu.

The night before, Elizabeth Glinka had left a message at the Institute: Adele was out of intensive care. Her doctor had spoken in encouraging terms. The elderly woman’s state had not deteriorated. Anna, who had been climbing the walls at home for three days, headed to the retirement home after first going on a special errand.

She knocked on the half-open door. A radio was playing soft jazz. She was surprised to hear the usual “
Kommen Sie rein!
” ring out in cheerful tones.

“You’re not too tired for a visit, Adele?”

“I am immortal, dear girl. A tough old bird, the Gödel woman! I’m in much better shape than you. You’re all pale.”

Anna didn’t deny it. She had avoided looking at herself in the mirror that morning as she freshened up.

“A little snort of bourbon? That would set our heads straight. Don’t worry, I’ll stick with my intravenous drip. I don’t know what it contains, but I highly recommend it. Are you sure you won’t? A cookie, then. Elizabeth left me enough to feed a regiment.”

Anna waved the suggestion away. She was hungry but felt no inclination to eat. For weeks she had experienced no connection between the two feelings.

“Elizabeth liked you. She is one of the rare people I still trust, although she does have a tendency to blabber on. Please have a cookie! You are going to lose your skirt someday just walking around. Not that it would be any great loss!”

The young woman obediently took a cookie. It was too sweet.

“You were afraid that you would find an empty bed when you arrived here. And not be able to complete your job.”

Anna strenuously swallowed her mouthful of food.

“You know perfectly well that’s not true.”

“Sorry. To speak in that way is just a reflex with me.
Mein Gott!
I said ‘Sorry’! You must be contagious. Oh, turn up the sound! It’s Chet Baker. What a handsome devil he was! He used to drive me crazy. And when you see what he is now. I hear that he takes drugs.”

“Nowadays, everyone takes drugs.”

“People were playing with opium and cocaine in Vienna long before the war! Every generation thinks it has invented partying and disillusionment. Despair is never out of fashion, just like nostalgia.”

“Nostalgia is also a drug.”

“Poppycock! Lovely memories are the only treasure no one can ever steal from you. Besides, they hardly let me bring anything else here, except my radio. And I have to play it so softly! So as not to awaken the dying.”

She sang along to “My Funny Valentine” in her reedy, approximate voice. Her gaiety seemed suspect, infused through the drip line.

“Today, I am hearing only the melody. My ears are giving out. They make a selection all on their own. The music survives the words.”

“And yet you have lots to say.”

“I have a lifetime of silence to make up for, darling girl.”

Adele’s eyes suddenly fell on the small green leaves poking out of Anna’s handbag.

“Camellias! My favorite flower! You are a researcher who has truly done her homework.”

“I picked them on Linden Lane. The garden isn’t really being maintained, but it’s still very pretty. I wanted to bring you fresh news of your old home. You must miss it.”

“I haven’t felt I was at home for at least forty years. Since we left Vienna. I have always been in exile.”

The IV drip line was too short and the old woman couldn’t reach the plants. “Bring them closer before the witch in wooden clogs comes to take them away.” Her haggard face lit up as she inhaled the delicate aroma. The young woman took the smile as payment. She had rung and rung at the gate without getting an answer, then steeled herself to sneak onto the property. But she couldn’t think of any other present that would make up for her earlier transgression. Adele rumpled a flower between her fingers and brought it to her nose before saying, “They don’t have much scent, but I didn’t think they would still be flowering this late in the year.”

Anna took hold of a petal as well. The smell was too faint to overcome the cinnamon taste that saturated her palate. She slipped the petal into her pocket. She would use it as a bookmark.

“Winter is late in coming.”

“The weather! That is really a topic for old people! With Kurt, I avoided it like the plague. He was almost married to his barometer. Now it’s too hot. Now not hot enough. Too much wind. The greatest logician in the world? No, the most tiresome bore!”

“How can you talk about your husband that way?”

“They put truth serum into my transfusion this morning. The man ruined my life!”

Adele buried her mirthful face in the flowers. Anna had prepared herself to visit a dying woman and was hardly ready for these effusions. She considered for a brief moment explaining that she had firsthand experience of a similar pain in the rear. When he was six, Leonard could do long division in his head, while Anna was still struggling with the multiplication tables. At twelve he started offering comments on the work of his mathematician father, who developed second thoughts about having fed his son’s insatiable curiosity. Quick-tempered and alluring, Leo would accept no restrictions. Like the recursiveness that fascinated him, he answered to no one but himself. From childhood on, he had exhausted his parents and “bijectively,” as he liked to say, they him. The Adamses did what they could to impose the necessary discipline on their precocious son, but when the normal antagonisms surfaced in adolescence, Leonard truly became an alien. They sent him to boarding school where he might vent his ill humor freely. To the family’s great relief, his chaotic progress did not result in their hopes being dashed. In the end, Leo had entered MIT without any help from his father, except a genetic predisposition to mathematics.

Anna placed a soothing hand on Adele’s, to which the old woman responded by clasping her hand hotly.

“I have some advice for you, young lady. Avoid mathematicians like the plague! They squeeze you dry like a lemon, abduct you from everything you love, and don’t even give you a brat in return!”

SUMMER
1942

Blue Hill Inn