The Goddess of Small Victories (2 page)

The widow Gödel looked at Anna, her faded blue pupils and bloodshot eyes matching the pattern of her flowered nightgown.

“He’s dead, Mrs. Gödel. No one can help that.”

The old woman twisted her wedding band around her yellowed finger.

“Out of what drawer of doctoral candidates did they pluck you?”

“I have no particular degree in science. I’m an archivist at the IAS.”

“Kurt took all his notes in Gabelsberger, a shorthand used in Germany but now forgotten. If I gave you his papers, you wouldn’t know what to do with them!”

“I know Gabelsberger.”

The old woman’s hands stopped playing with her ring and gripped the collar of her bathrobe.

“How is that possible? There are maybe three people in the world …”

“
Meine Grossmutter war Deutsche. Sie hat mir die Schrift beigebracht
.” My grandmother was German. She taught me how to write it.

“They always think they are so clever! I am going to trust you because you can spout a few words in German? For your information, Miss Librarian, I am Viennese, not German. And the three people who can read Gabelsberger don’t intersect with the ten people who can understand Kurt Gödel. Which neither you nor I are capable of doing.”

“I don’t claim to understand him. I’d like to make myself useful by inventorying the contents of the
Nachlass
so that others, who truly are qualified, can study it. This is not some airy fantasy, and it’s not a heist. It’s a mark of respect, Madam.”

“Why are you all hunched over? It makes you look old. Sit up straight!”

The young woman corrected her posture. All her life she had been hearing, “Anna, don’t slouch!”

“Those chocolates, where did they come from?”

“Oh, how did you guess?”

“A question of logic. Number one, you are a sensible girl, well brought up, you wouldn’t arrive here empty-handed. Number two …”

She gestured toward the door with her chin. Anna turned and saw a tiny wrinkled creature standing quietly in the doorway. Her pink, spangled angora sweater was smeared with chocolate.

“It’s teatime, Adele.”

“I’m coming, Gladys. Since you want to be useful, young lady, start by helping me out of this chromed coffin.”

Anna brought the wheelchair next to the bed, lowered the metal rails, and drew back the sheets. She hesitated to touch the old lady. Pivoting her body, Gödel’s widow set her trembling feet on the floor, then with a smile invited the young woman to help her up. Anna grabbed her under the arms. Once she was seated in the wheelchair, Adele gave a sigh of comfort, and Anna
a sigh of relief, surprised at having so easily rediscovered movements she had thought erased from her memory. Her grandmother Josepha trailed the same scent of lavender in her wake. Anna shook off her nostalgia. A lump in her throat was a small price to pay for such a promising first contact.

“Would you really like to give me pleasure, Miss Roth? Then next time bring a bottle of bourbon with you. The only thing we manage to smuggle into this place is sherry. I despise sherry. Besides, I’ve always hated the British.”

“Then I can come back?”

“
Mag sein
 …” Maybe so.

1928

Back When I Was Beautiful

I noticed him long before he ever looked at me. We lived on the same street in Vienna, in the Josefstadt district next to the university—he with his brother, Rudolf, and I with my parents. It was in the early hours of the morning, I was walking back to my house—alone as usual—from the Nachtfalter, “the Moth,” the cabaret where I worked. I’d never been so naïve as to believe in the disinterest of customers who offered to accompany me home after my shift. My legs knew the route by heart, but I couldn’t afford to lower my guard. The city was murky. Horrible rumors circulated about gangs that snatched young women off the street and sold them to the brothels of Berlin-Babylon. So here I was, Adele Porkert, no longer a girl exactly but looking about twenty, slinking along the walls and starting at shadows. “Porkert,” I told myself, “you’ll be out of these damn shoes within five minutes and tucked up in bed within ten.” When I’d almost reached my door, I noticed a figure on the opposite sidewalk, a smallish man wrapped in a heavy coat, wearing a dark fedora and a scarf
across his face. His hands were clasped behind his back and he walked slowly, as though taking an after-dinner stroll. I picked up my pace. My stomach knotted into a ball. My gut rarely misled me. No one goes for a walk at five o’clock in the morning. If you’re out at dawn and you’re on the right side of the human comedy, then you’re returning home from a nightclub or you’re on your way to work. Besides, no one would have bundled up like that on such a mild night. I tightened my buttocks and ran the last few yards, gauging my chances of rousing the neighbors by screaming. I had my keys in one hand and a little bag of ground pepper in the other. My friend Lieesa had showed me how I could use these to blind an attacker and lacerate his face. No sooner did I reach my building than I darted inside and slammed the thin wooden door shut behind me. What a scare he’d given me! I watched him from behind the curtain of my bedroom window: he continued to stroll. When I encountered my ghost the next day at the same time, I didn’t hasten my pace. For two weeks I ran into him every morning. Not once did he seem aware of my presence. Apparently he didn’t see anything. I began walking on his side of the street and took care to brush against him when passing. He never even raised his head. The girls at the club had a good laugh at my story of almost using the pepper. Then one day he wasn’t there. I left work a little earlier, a little later, just in case. But he had vanished.

Until one night in the cloakroom at the Nachtfalter when he handed me his heavy coat, a coat much too warm for that time of year. Its owner was a handsome dark-haired man in his early twenties with blue eyes blurred behind the severe black circles of his glasses. I couldn’t help taunting him.

“Good evening, Herr Ghost from the Lange Gasse.”

He looked at me as though I were the Commendatore himself, then turned to the two friends who accompanied him. One of them I recognized as Marcel Natkin, a regular at my father’s store. They sniggered as young men do when they are a little embarrassed, even the best educated. He wasn’t the type to go putting the make on hatcheck girls.

As he didn’t answer and I was busy with a sudden flood of customers, I decided not to press the point. I took the young men’s overcoats and ducked between the coat hangers.

Toward one o’clock, I put on my stage costume, a modest enough affair given how much some girls exposed of themselves at the fashionable clubs. It was a saucy sailor’s outfit: a short-sleeved shirt, white satin shorts, and a flowing navy-blue necktie. And I was of course fully made up. Amazing how much paint I wore in those days! I did my number with the other girls—Lieesa flubbed her dance routine again—then we turned the stage over to the comic singer. I saw the three young men sitting near the stage, all of them getting an eyeful of our exposed legs, my ghost not least among them. I resumed my station at the hatcheck stand. The Nachtfalter was a small club. We all had to do a little of everything—dancing and selling cigarettes between appearances onstage.

When the young man joined me a short while later, it was my friends’ turn to snigger.

“Excuse me, Fräulein, do we know each other?”

“I often pass you on the Lange Gasse.”

I hunted around under the counter to give myself something to do. He waited impassively.

“I live at number 65,” I said, “and you at number 72. But during the day I dress differently.”

I felt an urge to tease him. His muteness was endearing. He seemed harmless.

“What are you doing every night outdoors, other than watching your shoes move?”

“I like to think as I walk, that is … I think better when I’m walking.”

“And what is so terribly fascinating to think about?”

“I’m not entirely convinced …”

“That I’d understand? Dancers have heads too, you know!”

“Truth and undecidability.”

“Let me guess, you’re one of those philosophy students. You’re frittering away your father’s money on studies that will lead to nothing—except someday taking over the family’s hat-making business.”

“You’re almost right, philosophy does interest me. But I’m a student in mathematics. And, in point of fact, my father runs a garment factory.”

He seemed astonished to have spoken so many words. He bent his upper body forward at the waist in a parody of a military bow.

“My name is Kurt Gödel. And you are Fräulein Adele. Am I right?”

“Almost right, but then you can’t know everything!”

“That remains to be seen.”

He fled, walking backward, jostled by an influx of clients.

I saw him again, as I’d hoped, at closing time. His drinking pals must have stirred his blood during the evening.

“May I walk you home?”

“I would keep you from thinking. I’m very talkative!”

“It’s not a problem. I won’t listen to you.”

We left together on foot and climbed toward the university. We chatted, or rather, I asked him questions. We talked about
Lindbergh’s flight; about jazz, which he disliked; and about his mother, whom he seemed to truly love. We avoided discussing the violent political demonstrations of the past year.

I don’t know what color my hair was at the time. I’ve changed it so often in my life. I was probably blond, something on the order of Jean Harlow but less vulgar. Finer boned. In profile, I looked like Betty Bronson. Does anyone still remember her? I loved actors. I would pore over every issue of the weekly movie magazines. Well-bred Viennese society, of which Kurt was a part, looked down on the movies. They babbled endlessly about art, literature, and especially music. That was my first abdication, going to the movies without him. To my great relief, Kurt preferred comic opera to opera proper.

I had already put a cross on many of my youthful dreams. I was twenty-seven and divorced. When I was too young, I’d gone and married an unreliable man to escape my family. We were just emerging from those years of runaway inflation, of turnips and potatoes, of scrounging on the black market. We would soon plunge back into them. I was starving, eager to party, and I chose the first man to come along, a smooth talker. Kurt, on the other hand, never made a promise he couldn’t keep. He was sickeningly scrupulous. My girlhood dreams had gone by the board. I would have liked to be in the movies, along with every other girl at the time. I was a little wild, and I was pretty enough, my right profile, anyway. The tyranny of the permanent had just replaced the tyranny of long hair. I had bright eyes, a mouth always drawn in red, lovely teeth, and small hands. And lots of powder over the port-wine stain that disfigured my left cheek. Actually, this damned birthmark has served me well. I’ve blamed it for all my lost illusions.

Kurt and I had nothing in common, or very little. I was seven years older than he and had never been to university, while he
was preparing his doctorate. My father was a neighborhood photographer, his a prosperous manufacturer. He was a Lutheran, I a Catholic—though not a very devout Catholic at the time. For me, religion was a family relic that collected dust on the mantelpiece. The most you’d hear from the chorus girls in their dressing room was the prayer: “Blessed Mary, who became the mother of a child without doing it, please let me do it without becoming a mother!” We were all afraid of getting stuck with a little lodger, and I was no exception. Many of us wound up in the back rooms of Mother Dora’s place, where she kept her knitting needles. At the age of twenty, I accepted the luck of the draw as it came. Good card, bad card, I was still going to play. I didn’t think I had to store up any happiness or lightheartedness for later. I needed to burn everything, pillage everything. I’d always have time for another hand. I’d particularly have time for regret.

The walk ended as it had started, with both of us hiding our thoughts behind an uncomfortable silence. Even though I’ve never had any talent for mathematics, I know this basic premise: a tiny deviation in the angle at the start can mean an enormous difference at the end. In what dimension, in what version of our romance, did he not accompany me home that night?

“What does she mean,
‘Mag sein’
? Is she going to turn over the papers or not? What is she angling for here?”

“Time, I suppose. And a listening ear.”

“Take all the time you want, but make sure the
Nachlass
is in a safe place. And don’t go making her mad! The old bat could dump the whole pile in the trash.”

“I don’t think so. She seems perfectly lucid. On this subject, anyway.”

“It’s so stupid. She can’t even make sense of it.”

“They lived together for fifty years. He may have explained some aspects of his work to her.”

“We’re not talking about the recollections of a sales rep, for Pete’s sake! This is a field that most people can’t begin to understand even in its simplest form.”