The Goddess of Small Victories (33 page)

“I gave my honest opinion. This neighborhood isn’t the most practical to live in.”

“So Kurt will walk an extra twenty minutes. The broker told us that the house was sure to increase in value.”

“He could hardly say the opposite.”

My husband looked up from the puzzle on his plate.

“I hope this house won’t be too much for us. I hate the idea of being chained to such a big loan.”

“Why? Are you planning to return to Europe? You won’t even consider going to visit your sainted mother! Would you prefer to live in a student’s apartment until the day you retire?”

He frowned and pawed at his stomach, his usual answer to recriminations. Lili put a calming hand on my knee under the table. I pushed her away. Kurt wasn’t made of glass. Albert tried to smooth over my aggression by asking about my husband’s health, but I was in no mood to drop the subject.

“You’ve given him a new source of worry, Herr Einstein. Kurt worked for months on your birthday present.”

“You mean the engraving? I don’t understand.”

“I’m talking about his article on relativity.
²⁷
It got to the point where he stopped sleeping, poor dear.”

“Your husband was not the only one to suffer over that business. The editor was on the verge of a mental collapse. The text only reached him at the last moment and even then … If Gödel could have been at the foot of the printing press to go over his galleys once more, he would have done it!”

“You should have seen him picking apart the sales contract for this house!”

“If my presence is disturbing you, I can go and take my nap.”

“Don’t be upset, my friend. Your contribution didn’t get the reception it deserved, perhaps, but not because of the quality of your work. Who nowadays takes any interest in relativity?”

I now had the explanation for Kurt’s renewed insomnia. Again, all that effort for nothing. Would his time ever come? The curse of being always ahead. Or always a step to the side.

I’d had my own disappointment. I’d knitted a sweater for Albert in honor of his seventieth birthday, only to learn from Lili that he was allergic to wool. The useless sweater had gone to charity. The Gödels were both disappointed: Albert had expressed no more than polite enthusiasm for the engraving and for Kurt’s article. What is more unpleasant than being disappointed by a gift, unless it’s being the person whose gift is unappreciated? Lili had hit the jackpot: she had given Albert a heavy cotton pullover from Switzerland that she’d bought in an army surplus store, and the old codger wore it constantly. What an irony for a pacifist!

“What did this birthday present consist of, exactly?”

Oskar patted the hand of his young wife. “It’s too complicated to explain, Dorothy. Adele knows nothing more about it either.”

“I am perfectly well informed! Nothing he does can surprise me anymore. We might be able to travel through time? So what! Albert said it himself the other day: you can prove anything with mathematics.”

“You’re galloping a bit too far and too fast, Adele. You’ve probably taken on too much fuel.”

Lili walked right over Oskar’s acerbic comment.

“Is that really true? Then we actually do live in a sciencefiction world!”

My mollusk of a husband, sensing the energy levels growing more intense, retreated into his shell.

“Our friend Gödel is not a charlatan! Who does not know this?”

“Explain it to us, Herr Einstein! I’ll be able to tell my children that I had you as a teacher.”

Dorothy clapped her hands in excitement. She knew how to make men talk. I had a head start of twenty years in the matter, she had just as many years less on her hips. And Albert was not unswayed by her charms.

“Tell it to
my
children! They haven’t yet recovered from the experience.”

“Pour another glass for the master of time!”

“What I really need for this sort of performance is my pipe.”

I saw his young colleagues snort when he launched into a brief explanation of the mathematics of general relativity. His vocabulary was not unfamiliar to me. From listening to conversations, I’d acquired some basic notions of physics. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t picture his four-dimensional Jell-O: three dimensions in space and one in time. Maybe I didn’t have enough fingers. From what I’d understood, the ingredients Einstein assembled allowed a number of recipes to be prepared. His equations admitted of different solutions, each modeling a different possible universe. Even if it was difficult to imagine the existence of other worlds, it wasn’t impossible to conceive: with the same starting ingredients, I sometimes cooked very different dishes, from heavenly to horrible.

With his own mathematical cookery, my husband had exhibited the possibility of universes with indigestible geometry. In these worlds, space-time trajectories were closed loops in time, folding back on themselves. He had explained it to me by twisting my sewing ribbon. In other words, you could arrive at a station in the past with a ticket for the future. According to Kurt, if we traveled in a spaceship along a sufficiently large curve, we could, in this universe, go to any place
in time and come back from it, just as in our universe we traveled through space.

This virtuosic game irritated Albert, who had never been, as he liked to say, a mathematical prodigy. He admitted that as an adolescent he had been bored stiff in math class, and his teachers had never seen any particular sign of talent in the slouchy youth.
²⁸
Faced with my husband’s work, he displayed the coy modesty of an old class dunce to avoid challenging him on the essentials. Kurt had pushed his extrapolation to the point where it resulted in a model of time at odds with Albert’s philosophical tenets. But it displeased Albert to air this kink in their friendship publicly. He twisted a strand of hair by his ear, looking for an acceptable way out.

“Our friend has a head for heights. He has had the most extraordinary fun with his mathematics.”

Kurt pushed his plate away and folded his napkin in a square. The frivolous tone of the conversation irritated him, making light of his irreducible quest for precision. Oskar supplied a measure of soft soap.

“Enlighten us, Kurt. We’re all friends here, and we know you won’t hold our amateurism against us. We’re truly curious.”

“I don’t see why I should have to explain myself to an audience, half of which can’t understand objective terminology. You know that this is not simply a theoretical game, Herr Einstein. I am counting on someone to find empirical proof for this cosmological model. In point of fact I’ve calculated the values for the speed of travel quite accurately.”

“Did you remember to pack sandwiches for the trip?”

My remark landed with a leaden thud. Robert squashed his cigarette end and drilled my husband with his radioactive gaze.

“I don’t cast doubt on your perfectionism for a single moment, Gödel. But neither you nor I can corroborate the possibility with the technology at present available.”

“I expect to confirm my theory from a study of astrophysical phenomena. The first lead is to establish a movement of orbital precession among all galactic systems.”

Robert emptied his glass before lighting a fresh cigarette. He loved to have the last word. And those that came before.

“Let’s stop there. Kitty is unhinging her jaw with yawning. Your rotating universe is going to finish her off.”

“We had a rough night. Toni had nightmares. You know how much fun that is, Lili.”

“They have morbid anxieties at that age. When she was five, Hanna would wake me up to see if I was alive.”

I had no appetite for listening to a conversation where I had even less to contribute.

“I’ll bring some coffee.”

“Good and strong, Adele! Oppie likes it black as pitch.”

When I returned with my tray, the guests were still arguing over time.

“If I could travel into the past, I’d go back and kill Hitler.”

Kitty, whose eyelids always grew a little heavier when science was discussed, helped herself to a large cup of coffee.

“What a good idea, Lili! Let’s play What If!”

“My very beloved friend, if you had killed that monster before he dragged us all into the recent nightmare, we would not be here together in Princeton and ipso facto you would not be thinking of performing such charming acts.”

Lili frowned. If she’d been looking for a father figure in Albert, she had certainly found one.

“It’s a time paradox.
²⁹
An insurmountable obstacle to my dear friend’s theory of time travel.”

“A paradox is not an impasse, Herr Einstein. Just a challenge. I consider paradoxes as doors to be opened onto bigger universes.”

Oppenheimer drained his cup in a single gulp, then poured himself a second. Kurt could never have swallowed even a drop of that coal tar without whimpering about his ulcer.

“You’re a mathematician. Facts concern you very little.”

“Mathematics is the skeleton, where physics is the flesh, Robert. The first has no embodiment without the second. But the second would collapse without the first.”

I registered the physicist’s skeptical smile. Oppie knew about my husband’s ambition to support the theory of relativity with a systematic mathematical approach, just as Newton had been able to quantify the theory of gravitation. Although it was the IAS’s mission to encourage such ambitious work, the project seemed to him if not presumptuous, at least fairly risky. As Herr Einstein had just said, no one other than its originator and a few astronomers were still interested in relativity. All the physicists at Princeton worked on quantum mechanics. Kurt had always had a taste for impossible quests. Or outmoded ones. It wouldn’t be the “rotating universes,” which had everyone at the Institute laughing up their sleeves, that would pay off our mortgage.

“The possibility of time travel is not just a pleasant anecdote to be served up during society dinners,” said Kurt. “The philosophical implications strike me as much more captivating.”

“The two of you are squabbling over a toy that no one understands.”

“We’re not arguing, Adele. We’re discussing.”

Albert, entangled between his convictions and his desire to show kindness to his friend, took shelter in flattery.

“Study in general, and the pursuit of truth and beauty, are fields that allow us to remain children all our lives. Your husband has the wonderful quality of looking at every new object with fresh eyes, without a priori knowledge.”

“And of refusing to go outside and play with the big boys!”

Oskar choked on his coffee.

“Don’t use these superb metaphors for venting your domestic quarrels, Adele. Your husband is motivated by an admirable ambition, even if to your way of thinking it is not particularly salable. He wants to prove the
nature
of time by using mathematics. I see nothing puerile in that.”

Kitty, with her long acquaintance of drawing room disputes, decided it was time to draw the fire on herself.

“Dear Oskar, you remind me of my philosophy professor back at the Sorbonne. The students all called him ‘Kant-adoodledoo’! He looked like an old bedraggled rooster.”

Lili pursed her lips, and even Dorothy made an effort to keep from smiling so as not to wound her man. It was rare to see Morgenstern so thoroughly mortified.

“I didn’t mean to imply a physical resemblance, Oskar. Our host is trying to resolve the ancient quarrel between idealists and realists, isn’t he?
³⁰
Does time have objective existence?”

I thanked Kitty with a quick wink. How I’d have liked to be one of those women
—almost
able to enter the discussion on an equal footing. I watched them closely, envious of each for some aspect of her character. There was Kitty, a small, sparkling brunette with a hard glance but a dazzling smile, enviable for her husbands, her studies, her children, and her sumptuous house. There was Dorothy, who was young, beautiful, and hopelessly in
love with her big patrician beanpole of a husband. And I envied Lili her strength. Mine exploded in acid eruptions, while with hers, she rocked the world in her arms.

“I have proof that time really and truly does exist. And gravity. My eyelids are drooping!”

Oppenheimer took his wife’s face between his hands to kiss her wrinkles one by one. I was touched by this spontaneous gesture of affection. Kurt was embarrassed by such shows, which he himself never performed in public. And not often in private. He called us back to order: “Yet some philosophers suggest that time, or rather its passage, is an illusion that derives from our perception.”

“Time is kinder to you men. That’s my theory of relativity.”

“That’s entirely beside the point, Adele! Special relativity demonstrates that the simultaneity of two events is relative.”

“Darling, what I find relative is your sense of humor.”

Albert, absorbed in relighting his pipe, choked with laughter.

“You’re wrong, Adele! Your husband has a very subversive sense of humor. Under your gentleman’s guise, dear friend, you are an anarchist. You slip out and place your little bombs, unnoticed.”

“Kurt would never hurt a fly!”

“Follow my thinking. If you go back to some moment in the past, the intervening moments have never occurred. Time hasn’t passed. Consequently,
intuitive
time doesn’t exist. You can’t relativize a concept like time without destroying its very existence. Gödel has assassinated the great clock! It wasn’t enough for him to blow up the positivists’ dream!”

“Mother of God! Can I not leave you alone even for a moment, darling?”

“If I were traveling in the past and came face-to-face with Hitler, I would have no memory of the intervening experiences I had lived? I wouldn’t try to alter them?”

“To tell you the truth, darling Lili, I really don’t know for sure! Maybe we could relive all the good moments
ad vitam aeternam
and avoid the bad.”

“What about you, Professor? What would you change?”

“If I were young again?”

Albert drew on his pipe, staring at Oppenheimer, and muttered, “If I had to choose how to make my living, I wouldn’t try to become a research scientist. I’d become a plumber! It’s less threatening to mankind.”