The Goddess of Small Victories (6 page)

I was cooling my heels under the arcades when he finally emerged from the café, long after most of the others had left. I was thirsty, hungry, and planning to make a scene, just on principle. From the way his shoulders were hunched, I knew it was the wrong moment.

“Do you want to go out to dinner?”

“We don’t have to.”

He buttoned his jacket carefully. It no longer had the impeccable drape of the previous summer. It seemed to belong to another, stouter man.

“Let’s walk for a bit, if you don’t mind.”

For him “walking” meant cloaking himself in silence. After a few minutes, I couldn’t bear it any longer. What can you do except talk, to solace a man who refuses to eat or to touch you? I knew of no better remedy for anxiety.

“Why do you persist in meeting with this Circle when you don’t share their ideas?”

“They help me think, and I need to get my research in circulation. I have to publish my thesis to qualify for teaching.”

“You look like a little boy who’s been disappointed by his Christmas presents.”

He turned up his coat collar and stuck his hands in his pockets, unbothered by the damp night air. I linked my arm in his.

“I dropped a bomb on the table, and everyone patted me on the back, called for the check, and … that was it.”

I shivered too. From hunger, probably.

“You’re sure of yourself? You haven’t made any errors in calculation?”

He dropped my arm and chose another column of paving stones along which to advance.

“Adele, my proof is irreproachable.”

“I’m sure that’s true. I know the way you open a window three times to make sure it’s closed.”

A group of revelers hurtled into us. I galloped in my high heels to catch up with Kurt. He hadn’t paused in his train of thought, and I had to strain to follow it.

“Charles Darwin said that a mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there. I, on the other hand, stand in the purest light.”

“How can they not believe you, then? Your field is certainty. Everyone knows that two plus two equal four. This is a truth that will always stand!”

“Some truths are temporary conventions. Two and two don’t always equal four.”

“But come on, if I count it out on my fingers …”

“We stopped basing mathematics on felt experience a long time ago. In fact, we make a point of manipulating nonsubjective objects.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I hold you in great respect, Adele, but some subjects are truly beyond you. We’ve talked about this before.”

“Sometimes, you can move a complex idea forward by trying to state it simply.”

“Some ideas can’t be stated simply in ordinary language.”

“That’s exactly it! You imagine yourselves to be gods! You’d do better to take an occasional interest in what’s going on around you! Are you aware of people’s suffering? Do you have the slightest concern about the coming elections? I read the newspaper, Kurt, it’s written in the language of men!”

“You should learn to control your temper, Adele.”

He took my hand, the first time he had ever done so in public, and we walked under the silent arcades to the cross street.

“In certain cases, one can prove a thing and its opposite.”

“That’s nothing new, I specialize in it.”

“In mathematics, this is known as ‘inconsistency.’ In you, Adele, it’s contrariness. I have just proved that there exist
mathematical truths that cannot be demonstrated. That is incompleteness.”

“And that’s all?”

Irony never served as a bridge between us; he saw it as a simple error in communication. Sometimes it forced him to reformulate, find an acceptable image. These rare efforts were real proofs of love: a temporary relaxation of the tyranny of perfection.

“Imagine a being with eternal life, a being that spent its immortality taking stock of mathematical truths. Defining what’s true and what’s false. It could never come to the end of its task.”

“God, in short.”

He hesitated a moment before walking forward, the wear of the pavement obscuring the path he’d set for himself.

“Mathematicians are like children who pile truth bricks one on top of another, building a wall to fill the emptiness of space. They ask if all the bricks are solid, if some might not make the whole edifice crumble. I proved that in one part of the wall, certain bricks are inaccessible. As a result, we’ll never be able to verify that the entire wall is solid.”

“You horrible brat, it isn’t nice to spoil other people’s games!”

“My game too, possibly, but at the outset I never thought I would destroy it—just the opposite.
³

“Why don’t you go back to physics, then?”

“Everything in physics is even more uncertain. Especially now. It would take too long to explain it all. Physicists are part of the confusion. They’re looking for a bucket big enough to cover the buckets of the ones who came before. Theories that are even more global.”

“Each of them is trying to piss farther than his playmates.”

“I’m sure my colleagues will fully appreciate your views on scientists, Adele.”

“Bring them on! I’ll teach them about life.”

For several seconds, he considered unleashing me in the cloistered halls of the university by way of retaliation. But the thought didn’t help to relax him.

“They don’t respect me. I know what they’re saying behind my back. Even Wittgenstein, although he distrusts the positivists, takes me for a conjurer, a manipulator of symbols.”
⁴

“That man hasn’t got all his marbles. He gave his fortune away to some poets and went off to live in a cabin. You’d put your trust in him?”

“Adele!”

“I’m trying to make you laugh, Kurt, but I’m starting to realize that we’re facing an on-to-log-i-cal impossibility.”

“You learned that word in the Nachtfalter’s coat room?”

We reached his street. From a distance I could see a light on in the windows of his apartment: his mother never went to sleep until she heard his footsteps in the hallway. To stay out all night was to sentence her to wakefulness. We joked about it. Sometimes. That night, the lonely one was to be me.

“In a nutshell, you used this logic of yours to prove that there are limits to logic?”

“No, I demonstrated the limits of formalism. The limits of mathematics as we know it.”

“So you didn’t tip all of their precious mathematics into the garbage! You just proved to them that they would never be gods.”

“Leave God out of all this. It’s their faith in the all-powerfulness of mathematical thinking that has been breached. I’ve killed Euclid, struck down Hilbert … I’ve committed sacrilege.”

He got out his travel kit, a sign by which he often brought debates to a close:
Don’t come too close, my mother might see you from the window
.

“I need to work on my speech. I am meeting Carnap in two days.”

“That bullfrog, he’d like to think he’s bigger than—”

“Adele! Carnap is a good man, he’s helped me enormously.”

“He’s a Red. And he’s going to be in trouble soon enough.”

“You don’t know the first thing about politics.”

“I keep my ear to the ground. And what I’m hearing isn’t so favorable to the intelligentsia, believe me!”

“Adele, I have enough to worry about already. I’m very tired.”

He replaced his keys in his pocket: tonight we would sleep together, and she would be the one to wait.

“You’re finally being reasonable.”

“I only know one way to keep you quiet.”

He had brought his masters’ hopes crashing down—not the hopes they’d placed in him but those they’d entertained about their own omnipotence. His positivist friends wanted to boil down the
unsayable
, what human language cannot address. In mathematics, limiting research to the discipline’s mechanism was an illusion; Kurt had produced a corrosive result from the very language intended to provide consolidation.

He had never been a blind disciple of the Vienna Circle, even proving to be a wolf in their fold, but his world was a small one and he needed a place for himself in it. He needed the positivists for stimulation, to keep from being carried along by the zeitgeist. This might also have been what he liked about me: my
candor. I accepted my intuition as a natural phenomenon. He was attracted by my legs, but he stayed with me for my radiant ignorance. He would say, “The more I think about language, the more astounded I am that people manage to understand each other.” He never spoke in approximations. Surrounded as he was by clever talkers, he preferred keeping silent to being in error. He liked humbleness in the face of truth. This virtue he had to the point of toxicity: unwilling to make a misstep, he would forget to take any step at all.

The bomb was truly a bomb, but its action was delayed. I wasn’t the only one who had trouble understanding it. The very tools he used in his proof were innovations, and even the most gifted mathematicians needed time to absorb their import. At the long-awaited conference, Kurt was overshadowed by the titans of physics—Heisenberg, for instance. The polymath von Neumann spoke in support of him, but a transcript of the conference didn’t even mention Kurt.

Within a few months, however, his discoveries started to gain notice and then became impossible to ignore, witnessed by the fact that any number of adversaries tried to find a flaw in his argument. The radius of the bomb extended across the Atlantic and came back to us in the form of a lecture contract at Princeton University, meaning we would probably be separated. Meanwhile I saw him invaded by a sense of doubt, which was never to leave him again.

He started to feel misunderstood. Him, the boy genius, the little ball of sunshine. The brilliant taciturnist among the wordy, the political, and the clever. He thought he had reached an island of peace and a gathering of the like-minded. He had made loyal friends there, no doubt, but he had also found hate in unexpected quarters and, just as painfully, indifference. I was
at his side, tender and attentive, but I was entering a battle with few weapons to hand: you don’t fill a metaphysical vacuum with apple strudel.

The world around us was decaying. He had managed to remainder the century well before its term. Doubt and uncertainty were now to be its foundation. He was always ahead of his time.

Anna arrived at Adele’s room in a muck sweat; visiting hours were almost over.

“You’re late, it’s not like you.”

“I’m glad to see you too, Mrs. Gödel.”

Still wearing her raincoat, she held out a cardboard box printed with the name of a wonderful Princeton delicatessen. Adele lit up when she saw its contents. “Sacher torte!” The young woman handed her a plastic spoon decorated with a blue ribbon. Adele immediately carved into the cake and spooned an enormous wedge into her mouth.

“My Sacher torte was better. But you’ve got talent. You know how to talk to old ladies.”

“Only undeserving old ladies.”

“Show me even one who is deserving and I’ll eat the box as well! So, how are you coming along? Have you freed yourself from the nets and snares of this Calvin Adams?”

“I won’t hide the fact that he’s very worried.”

“Not about my health, that is certain. I am his black cloud, his little thorn.”

“You’re not exactly a planetary priority.”

“I’m well aware of that! And you? Why are you clinging to me as you do? Is your position so precarious?”

“I take great pleasure in our conversations.”

“Just as I enjoy your presents. Would you like some?”

Anna turned down the offer. Her altruism didn’t extend to sharing the old lady’s spoon.

“What is he like, this director?”

“He wears a turtleneck under his shirt.”

“I remember him. He has been cradle robbing at the Institute for some time. They say the secretaries all button up their blouses before they walk into his office.”

Her spoon hovering in midair, a chocolate stain on her chin, Adele observed her visitor. Anna hid her confusion by rummaging in her purse. Its contents were impressive: a zippered pouch for pens, another for medications, two active file folders, a book in case she had to wait (Borges’s
Aleph
), a sewing kit, a bottle of water, a plump personal organizer, and a set of keys on a long chain. She walked around with such a heavy bag that her back was constantly in pain. At night she would tell herself to lighten its weight, only to take the whole business with her again in the morning. Eventually she found a handkerchief, which she laid flat on the bed next to the box of pastries. Adele ignored it.

“With a bag like that you could live through a siege. Is it hard not to be in control of everything, young lady?”

“You’re a shrink in your spare time?”

“Do you know the Jewish joke: What is a psychiatrist?”

Anna stiffened. As a Catholic in Austria in the 1930s, Adele would have a simple resolution to this equation with no unknowns.

“A psychiatrist is a Jew who studied to be a doctor to make his mother happy but who faints at the sight of blood.”

“Do you have a problem with Jews? It isn’t the first time you’ve probed me about this.”