The Goddess of Small Victories (50 page)

And she hung a garland around Anna’s neck, as though she were a lovely Hawaiian who had strayed off course.

1978

Alone

“I’m happy to do that for you.”

“I need to do it myself, sweet girl.”

She gave me a pat on the hand.

“Then I’ll go and prepare afternoon tea!”

Elizabeth went into the kitchen, leaving me with a mountain of papers heaped on the living room rug. I had to find the courage for this last ordeal.

There had been so few of us at his funeral: a few attendants with graying temples, eager for it to be over, supporting a handful of old ladies in black: Dorothy without Oskar, Lili without Erich. The men go first, that’s how it is. Shivering, I clung to Elizabeth’s arm. A long car had brought the casket. Had someone spoken a few touching words? I didn’t remember. The Institute must have coughed up some sort of speech all the same. I remembered practically nothing after the trip to the Kimble Funeral Home. Except for the flowers: I’d thrown red roses onto
the coffin before it was covered with earth. Camellia season was over. Since January 19, Kurt had been sleeping under a slab of dark gray marble. My mother was resting a few feet away. She wouldn’t bother him; she’d always slept like the dead.

Elizabeth returned with the tea tray. We drank a cup of tea and nibbled on biscuits, listening to the merry crackling in the fireplace, already tired from the effort ahead.

“How do you want to do this, Adele?”

“We need to pay careful attention to chronological order. Some of the boxes are already labeled. Otherwise, Kurt left no specific instructions. Except about the stamps. Rudolf is supposed to sell them. He’d probably like to sell the entire archive, but I’m not going to let him do that.”

“And for everything else?”

“I’ll sort. You file.”

“Seeing this pig’s breakfast, no one would guess that your husband was as meticulous as I remember him!”

“He kept everything. He must have found some logic in it.”

A last housecleaning for Kurt. It’s the only thing I ever did for him throughout my life. Putting the world in order to keep that damned entropy from swallowing him up. Do all women share the same fate? We mate out of love or a need for security, only to wind up keeping afloat the one who’s meant to be a rock. Is that what happens to all of us? These brothers, fathers, lovers, friends—are we there to fish them out when they go down? Is that the cockeyed reason God gave us breasts and hips? Are we no more than flotation devices? What is left to us afterward, when there is no longer anyone to save?

Putting the memories away.

“When it isn’t his illegible scrawl, it’s written in stenographer’s shorthand. It’s going to drive me crazy.”

“You should get a little rest, Adele. We’ve been at it for three days. It can wait a little longer.”

“I prefer to get it done. These scribbles were important to him.”

The sorting wasn’t going forward. I couldn’t reach into these papers without pulling out a piece of the past: a photograph, a note in his handwriting, a newspaper clipping. No one could have resisted this toxic drip of nostalgia. It wasn’t an inventory but the autopsy of a life.

Kurt had died rolled up in a ball on the chair of his hospital room. Alone.

What did he think about before letting go? Who did he think about? Did he call out to me? Did he reproach me for not being there? The one time that I didn’t come running. Only my body, this grotesque vessel, was at fault. My body had put me in prison. The moth had gone back to being a caterpillar. A huge larva, without arms to enfold my man one last time, without a voice to tell him, “It’s nothing, Kurtele. It’ll pass. A spoonful for the road, please.”

Did he die of malnutrition as they said? No, it was more a work-related accident: he was looking into uncertainty; he died riddled with doubt. He was the doctor who, investigating his own pathology, discovers that it can never be cured. Life is not an exact science, everything about it is fluctuating, unprovable. He couldn’t verify it parameter by parameter. He couldn’t axiomatize existence. What had he searched for that wasn’t in his heart, his bowels, or his sexual organ? He had decided not to involve himself, to place himself outside the world to understand it. There are systems from which we can’t exclude ourselves. Albert knew it. To exclude yourself from life is to die.

“Adele, I found this in a separate place, in a closed file folder.”

I examined the slender page: a series of signs, axioms and definitions, without explanation or commentary, as flat as a day without music. My gaze stumbled across the last sentence, fully spelled out: “Theorem 4: there is necessarily something that is like God.” What was God doing here? I reread the proof, since it seemed to be one. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the jargon. His damned logic again, which I had never learned to speak.
Positive property
;
if and only if; consistent property
.

“Is it important?”

“It must be a proof that shows … the existence of God.”
⁶³

Elizabeth read the page with and without glasses. She gave the paper back to me, perplexed, undoubtedly disappointed.

“We’ll put it under ‘Miscellaneous.’ ”

What lack of humility! What madness! How could he? What chasm had he come to? God must have been pleased to have him at His table! Kurt could make conversation with Him: “Hey, Pater! I’ve got a good one. You’re going to love this! I’ve proved Your existence.” Did God have a sense of humor? I was sure of it. Otherwise, we would never have met, Kurt and I.

I had to admit the fact that I was relieved. My string of blasphemies confirmed it. It was time for him to go. Our final years had ended in hell. How could I have stood to see him like that much longer? An unbearable caricature of himself, who went from being thin to skeletal, from being a genius to mad. Had it happened all at once, or had he strayed and gotten lost in the infinite border between those two essences? Lost forever in the continuum.

For all those years, I had managed to maintain hope. I had believed in possibilities. But when Oskar found him crouching behind the boiler, I gave up. I went into mourning for those possibilities. For the me that would never exist, for the him that he
could have been, for what I would never be again without him.
If and only if
we had been
others
. I preferred keeping him in my memory: he wipes his glasses to get a better look at my cleavage in that tearoom in Vienna.

I’ve always eaten my black bread last: I had set aside two boxes marked “Personal.” Elizabeth and I each took one. There was no likelihood of my finding love letters inside. We had left them to burn in Vienna. I might find a few of my postcards from Europe or some of the photographs that hadn’t turned up earlier. But most likely they held letters from his
liebe Mama
. After all these years, why did it make me so upset? She had often been the focus of my anger. Presumably the old girl wasn’t to be outdone. Old girl. I was one of them now. Why worry about a dead woman’s opinion? The truth I’d always avoided was plain enough: I was her double, just a crutch.

“What should I do with this?”

Elizabeth was holding a pile of his constipation and body-temperature notebooks. She kept her tone light; she had cared for my husband without commenting on his quirks.

“I’d be happy to throw them in the fire, but someone would surely reproach me for it! These odd records were also a part of him.”

“I’m just thinking of the reaction of the person who finds them.”

“It will be a relief from all the rest.”

“You’re not afraid that he’ll be taken for—”

“Look at this, he kept the bill for our wedding lunch! I can’t believe he crossed all of Siberia with this paper in our trunks.”

“Maybe he was nostalgic.”

“He intended to present the total bill to me at the end.”

“He loved you so much, Adele.”

“Now that’s a good one. A bill requesting his membership dues for the Mathematical Society. Kurt hated debts. He would have been unhappy about this all his life. I should send them a check.”

“Save your money, Adele. You’re going to need it. I just found a receipt for something called
Principia Mathematica
.”

“It was his constant reading when we first met. Put it with his doctoral thesis in the box marked 1928/1929.”

I looked through some worn postcards. Maine, 1942. We’d bought them together and never sent them.

“Your German passports, which box do they go in?”

I opened his. He looked so young, he seemed a completely different person. The Nazi eagle had released its turd on the page. I gave both passports back to Elizabeth without even opening mine.

“The box for 1948, with the naturalization papers.”

“Good grief, Adele, how pretty you were! I’ve never seen this photograph before.”

I glanced for a moment at the yellowing print of a young lady posing, a vague smile on her lips.

“File it with ‘Miscellaneous.’ ”

“Don’t you want to keep it for yourself?”

“I’m not that person anymore, Elizabeth.”

“Of course you are!”

I continued sorting through the documents. I came across a letter from his brother addressed to the sanatorium: the 1936 box. An ocean liner ticket from Japan: the 1940 box. A heavy file with financial records for the mortgage on the house: the 1949 box. It had been paid in full and now had been resold. I was moved by a tiny piece of faded paper, a coat-check claim from the Nachtfalter: the 1928 box.

“There are still these letters from Marianne Gödel.”

I sighed. “I’ll have to read the whole thing.”

“You’re not obliged. It’s painful for you.”

“Would you leave me alone with them? It won’t take me long.”

“I’m going to finish packing your boxes. You really don’t want to take anything with you?”

“Send everything to the storage facility. You’ve seen the bedroom at Pine Run. There’s no room for bulky memories. Which is a good thing!”

“Should I call the IAS about the archives?”

“Not right away, Elizabeth.”

What had they found to write about over the course of all those years? She probably heaped a boatload of blame on me. He would barely have defended me, as usual. I’d never been able to inspire him, to stimulate his intellect. It wasn’t my role, and I didn’t feel any resentment about it. But had he granted her all the explanations he’d refused me? Had she had access to his light? That woman.

I opened one at random: 1951, congratulations for his prize. A letter dated November 1938, a month after our wedding, went on endlessly about political issues and sanitary advice. 1946: the situation in Europe, news of his godfather’s death. In 1961, she responded to his theological view of the world.
⁶⁴
He had explained it to her in detail, then. I feverishly unfolded one after another of her letters, absorbed in their revelations. Elizabeth stuck her head in the door from time to time but, unwilling to intrude, went back to her chores.

I found no trace of bitterness toward me. In forty years of correspondence, she never wrote about me once or even mentioned my name. The letters burned my fingers.

“Have you finished, Adele?”

I turned my ravaged face toward Elizabeth. My first tears since Kurt’s death. She took me in her arms, rocked me without saying any useless words. I clung to her, drunk with a mixture of rage and pain. I was reeling with despair. My temples pounded to the beat of my frightened heart. But I didn’t want to leave. Not right away.

“I didn’t exist for them, Elizabeth. I never existed.”

When I calmed down, I extricated myself from her embrace. I painstakingly gathered the letters that had spilled on the floor and threw them in the fire.

Anna shook the snow off her clothes and her hair before entering the lobby of the IAS. She hadn’t expected this late cold spell; she was shivering in her lightweight beige coat. Nature would mourn in white today. She needed to think about putting away her cold-weather clothes. Since Adele’s funeral she hadn’t set foot in the office or given any reason for her absence. She hadn’t answered the telephone, hadn’t opened her mail. Her sudden reappearance would demand an explanation. As Adele might have said, “You can all go to hell!”

On that morning, Elizabeth Glinka had telephoned her. She was just preparing to visit Mrs. Gödel, as she had done every weekend since Christmas. “Miss Roth?” Anna knew what would come next. She had sat down to let the grief flood through her. She hadn’t said goodbye to Adele.

There had been so few people at the funeral: a few attendants with graying temples, eager for it to be over, supporting a handful of old ladies in black. Shivering, she had clung to Elizabeth’s arm. She hardly remembered the moment. The long car had brought the casket. Had Calvin Adams made a speech? She couldn’t remember it. She had thrown red roses onto the casket
before it was covered with earth. She hadn’t found any camellias. The religious ceremony had been stiff and brief. Elizabeth had asked her advice about the music. Anna had suggested a Mahler song, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,” I am lost to the world, in homage to the Vienna that was gone. During the service, she changed her mind and thought she should have chosen James Brown, just to see Gladys bring life to the empty chapel with the shimmying of her black angora. Barbie had a black sweater. Why did this pathetic detail stick in Anna’s mind?

Adele was lucid to the end. The nurses hadn’t been able to understand her last words: they were in German. Anna was sure they were addressed to her husband. Since February 8, she had been lying next to him under the gray marble slab. On the pages of the open book, the words were engraved:
Gödel, Adele T.: 1899–1981, Kurt F.: 1906–1978
. From now on she would sleep on the left side of the bed.

The security guard at the IAS waved her toward him. He seemed as old as the building itself. Emerging from his usual silence, he expressed how happy he was to see her again. People had been worried about her. Anna had no time to wonder who was meant by “people”; the guard deposited on the counter a large package. She blew on her numb fingers and opened the accompanying envelope. The card, written in childish handwriting, was signed by Elizabeth Glinka. “I am sending you a present and a letter from Adele. Don’t be sad. She wasn’t. She wanted to go.” Anna smiled in spite of herself. She was sad, but the feeling would be bearable now. It was a sadness that came from accomplishment, not regret, the sadness you feel the day after a party. She hefted the package: no chance of its containing the
Nachlass
. It didn’t matter. She had already made up her mind to leave Princeton. This time, her protracted absence had not
been a flight; it had allowed her to gather her strength, swathed in her red woolen cardigan. She would put her resignation letter on Calvin Adams’s desk in the course of the morning.