A Universe of Sufficient Size

by Miriam Sved

  About A Universe of Sufficient Size

  I have wished so many times that I had acted differently.

  I wish that I had been more worthy of you . . .

  Eventually the war will end, and then we will find each other.

  Until then, remember me.

  Budapest, 1938. In a city park, five young Jewish mathematicians gather to share ideas, trade proofs and whisper sedition.

  Sydney, 2007. Illy has just buried her father, a violent, unpredictable man whose bitterness she never understood. And now Illy’s mother has gifted her a curious notebook, its pages a mix of personal story and mathematical discovery, recounted by a woman full of hopes and regrets.

  Inspired by a true story, Miriam Sved’s beautifully crafted novel charts a course through both the light and dark of human relationships: a vivid recreation of 1930s Hungary, a decades-old mystery locked in the story of one enduring friendship, a tribute to the selfless power of the heart.

  Contents

  About A Universe of Sufficient Size

  Title page

  Contents

  Dedication

  1. Brooklyn, 1950

  2. Sydney, 2007

  3. Budapest, July 1938

  4. Sydney, 2007

  5. Budapest, 1938

  6. Sydney, 2007

  7. Sydney, 2007

  8. Budapest, 1938

  9. Sydney, 2007

  10. Budapest, 1938

  11. Sydney, 2007

  12. Budapest, 1938

  13. Sydney, 2007

  14. Sydney, 2007

  15. Sydney, 2007

  16. Budapest, 1938

  17. Sydney, 2007

  18. Brooklyn, 1951

  19. Sydney, 2007

  20. Budapest, February 1944

  Acknowledgements

  About Miriam Sved

  Also by Miriam Sved

  Copyright

  In memory of Marta Sved, who loved mathematics and also stories.

  I hope she wouldn’t mind the liberties I’ve taken with both.

  Statue of Anonymous, Budapest.

  Brooklyn, 1950

  There were children playing outside. Probably they belonged to the Hasidic family downstairs. Their games and chatter drifted up through the open window to where she sat at her small kitchen table. She was staring at the pages of mathematical workings that had arrived in the afternoon mail.

  Along with the pages of workings there was a letter, but this she had slotted carefully back into the envelope as soon as she recognised the handwriting. Her fingers shook slightly. It was dated six years ago, the envelope postmarked Budapest. She didn’t know who could have sent it after all this time.

  She felt watched. It was a strange sensation, after years of feeling abandoned. Some great cosmic joke played at her expense, God finally showing his hand.

  She and her husband had only been in this place, in Brooklyn, for a few months. She was perhaps just beginning to settle into her new life, and to anchor herself in a future given some shape by the little life inside her. Now she could forget everything, she could forget her own name. The pages of workings were more real than any of it. They took her straight back to the day the genius had visited them, there at the base of Anonymous in the City Park: a sharp cut of light through the trees in the courtyard, the statue lofty above them.

  The pages were scattered across with dots, and with four- and five-pointed structures. Once she believed they were the key to everything. She thought they would crack open the universe and lay it out in an ordered array. But it turned out that no-one was clever enough to read their meaning: not even Pali, and if he couldn’t do it probably no-one ever would.

  She stayed at the table until the light began to change in the kitchen. She ignored the changing of the light and the encroaching return of her husband and the flutterings in her stomach. Every now and then a shout from the children downstairs broke through to her and she gave a little start, then returned to the work. She wasn’t looking for a proof – it was too hard and, besides, she had decided long ago not to do mathematics anymore. But perhaps she might catch sight of something else she needed: an illuminating pattern, some outline of causation. She might glimpse the trail of forces that had brought her here, marooned in America with a man who still felt like a stranger and her inner life such a series of snarls that she couldn’t tell anymore which ones began with lies.

  The constellations of dots didn’t tell her anything, or nothing she didn’t already know. They would hold on to their secrets.

  Sydney, 2007

  In the week before her father’s funeral, Illy feels like her children are trying to undo her. They both seem determined to make everything about them.

  Illy herself isn’t exactly reverential about her father’s death; but still, the bald fact of mortality should confer something loftier than these domestic squabblings.

  First there is Josh, asking her for money for some maths idea he says will make him famous. (Honey, Illy thinks but doesn’t say, no-one in our family ever got famous off a maths idea.) Then Zoe, with her big announcement.

  Neither of them seems to take account of the time, of their grandfather. Everyone had been waiting for him to die for so long, they’d all started thinking of him as a non-person. And he’d never exactly made himself popular before that. Illy herself is surprised to find a niggling grief: nothing heavy, just a layer or two of comfort stripped off the world. She keeps forgetting why she feels vaguely bereft, and then remembering with a shock.

  She doesn’t say no to Josh right away: she’d rather avoid a confrontation, and anyway she has a feeling that he would run straight to Russell (and she is also perhaps a tiny bit gratified that he came to her first). But he has the nerve to get shitty – eye-rolling, jaw-clenching shitty – when she doesn’t say yes straight away either. As though he can’t believe her irrationality but is determined to suffer it with dignity. Josh always used to be the solid one – the kid who could be trusted not to litter his adolescence with landmines to explode the family unit. Now he is two and a half semesters from completing his degree and he wants to go and work in an open-plan office with ping-pong tables and hip American nerds. That is the gist of it, as Illy understands.

  The conversation with Zoe is more complicated, murkier, and Illy doesn’t really let herself think about it afterwards, and still hasn’t dealt with it by the time her mother moves in.

  Illy’s mother Eszter brings her old-fashioned canvas suitcase and installs herself in the guest room after only one suggestion that she should come to stay, so Illy knows she must be desperate. She will stay for a short time, just a few days before and after the funeral. A week or two at most. Illy feels an itchy entrapment in the responsibilities of being an only child. But she has a brochure in her bedside table drawer that has been a source of hope and comfort for weeks, since before her father died, and with Eszter in her house it will be easier to find the right moment to give it to her.

  She picks up her mother and the big suitcase from the house in Bondi Junction, and when they get home there is a scuttling and closing of doors in their wake: both her children evading her. ‘For God’s sake,’ she wants to shout up the stairs, ‘get over yourselves!’ She is fighting a rising panic about the bottle of paprika she saw before Eszter closed her suitcase. Apparently her mother expects to cook in Illy’s kitchen.

  On the same day Eszter moves in the notebook appears on the kitchen counter. It is small and unremarkable, and Illy thinks at first that it must be her mother’s address book and leaves it where it is. But some time la
ter that afternoon the book migrates from the bench to the middle of the kitchen table, and announces its presence forcefully and directly. A message for Illy: some offering her mother is trying to signpost. The fact that Eszter is supposed to be napping – Illy doesn’t even know when she left her bedroom – raises the frequency of the message to a pitch only Illy can hear.

  She gives in to the notebook’s demand, opening the hard brown cover just an inch to peek inside.

  Handwritten Hungarian. Neat, forward-sloping writing; not like the cramped arthritic script her mother has now. Eszter’s name is printed at the top of the first page. Some kind of journal? She picks it up, and loose pages slip out from the back of the book. When Illy unfolds them she receives her first inkling that what Eszter has given her is something to do with maths. The pages – there are four of them – are sprinkled with conglomerations of dots. That’s all: big and little constellations, like stars in the night sky, some of them joined up to make shapes: random, spiky, meaningless shapes of four or five sides. The mathsness of it works like a repellent on her nervous system, she wants to drop the book immediately, but she stares at the dots for another minute, hoping that their message might reveal itself without requiring her to wade through what she assumes is some explanatory text in the notebook. She hates having to immerse herself in that other, indecipherable language that her mother has tried, intermittently throughout her life, to force Illy to speak. It is so typical of Eszter to leave a message in that hostile language here, in Illy’s kitchen where she has to engage with it. Two decades ago Eszter did her PhD on abstract geometry; the dots look like they might have something to do with that. Although Illy has never really figured out what abstract geometry is.

  Or they could represent a skin condition. Some ugly rash.

  She refolds the pages, shoves them back into the little book, and puts the book on the kitchen bench among the jumble of bills and household crap that always gathers there.

  ∴

  Budapest, July 1938

  Eszter Kún

  ‘No-one shall expel us from this paradise!’

  My best friend Ildiko said this to me on a day many weeks ago, and it has come into my head often since then. She didn’t intend it literally, quite the opposite, but I know I have a talent for taking the wrong meaning from things. I want to try to convey this to you.

  It was a Monday. I remember that because it was the day after the referendum in Austria, when they voted for their own occupation and the small German psychopath became chancellor there. That was what led to the joke about Cantor’s paradise: his miraculous infinities being our own little world.

  My friends and I had met at our regular place at the statue of Anonymous, in front of the castle in the City Park. Tibor, my fiancé, was very grave about the Vienna situation and wanted to discuss it with the three of us – myself, Ildiko and Levi – before Pali arrived.

  Pali always ran late. I will tell you about Pali in due course; too much about him, probably.

  Tibor had a letter open in his lap – it had only just arrived, a message from the depths of Hades, the occupied city, from a man we did not know named Professor Voigt. The letter, the timing of when we received it, made the referendum seem terrible luck, for this professor had actually invited Pali to Vienna to meet with him and discuss certain opportunities. Tibor was all in favour of Pali taking up the offer, Hitler or no Hitler.

  ‘Perhaps we will finally appreciate our paradise under the benevolent Horthy,’ said Levi. Levi had a satirical bent and could raise one eyebrow into a perfect peak, but his irreverence did not ring true, for we all knew that he would never risk mocking the government if there was anyone but us to hear.

  Ildiko, who was stretched out on the ground in front of Levi, rolled her eyes. They made a beautiful couple reclining there in the sunlight. They had only been a couple for a few months but I sometimes thought Ildiko treated him as though they had been together for years – fond but impatient. She was looking up at me when she said dryly, ‘No-one shall expel us from this paradise!’

  I knew what she was thinking about – all the tedious tutoring jobs we have been confined to because the government locks us out of most regular work, and her family’s poverty, and the niggling insults and rules against Jews. But the words struck me in a different sense: they struck me as true. It was a glorious afternoon in the park, the new sun soft on my face as it filtered through the sycamores in the castle courtyard. Everything was illuminated, my happiness in the scene tinged with an almost magical sense of anticipation. Pali, you see, would be arriving any minute.

  I don’t want to make excuses for myself, but I hope you will understand a little better once I have laid everything out for you. I have such fond memories of our time together on Uncle Gyuri’s farm. I remember we were quite simpatico as children, even though you and your sister were so much older. So I would like to try to convey to you my happiness. Along with knowing us all a little bit, I hope that understanding the motives for what I have done might help. I barely understand my motives half the time, but I know that Pali Kalmar is important to them.

  Although not only Pali. My happiness has been made up of all of them. On that same afternoon, the afternoon of the letter and of our paradise, I would offer to take Pali to Vienna, which I suppose was what really set all this in motion, and I distinctly remember at the moment when I made that great self-sacrificing offer it was mostly because I could feel Tibor’s eyes on me. I wanted to impress him. Tibor, you see, deserved a revolutionary bride. I felt the intensity of his eyes, that he was looking at me with the focus he applied when something was worthy of his attention, and I tried to hold my head at a jaunty angle and stare into the future as though staring down a German tank.

  And also Ildiko, my fearsome Ildi. We have known each other since we were little more than children; we were inseparable throughout our school years: Ildiko and Eszter, Eszti and Ildi. She was always much stronger than me, braver and better (and I should admit here to a worming little insecurity of mine: that she and Tibor would have made a much more suitable couple than either me and Tibor or Ildiko and Levi). I remember she did not look pleased when I made my offer about Vienna: she glared up at me from the ground, a telltale little crease appearing between her eyes. ‘Better me than you,’ I said to her. ‘You’d only attract attention.’ This was unkind, as Ildiko does not like to be reminded of her looks. She blushed – an uneven, blotchy blush that somehow suited her very well.

  And Levi: even he has been part of my happiness. He can be a little more frivolous than the others. At that moment, for instance, he and Ildiko were a study in contrast; he beamed up at me as she glared, and he nodded admiringly at my silly heroics. He had an arm around Ildiko’s middle – I knew she wouldn’t like that but she seemed to be tolerating it – and I noticed that the coat he had laid out on the paving stones for her to sit on was his good spring one, and I felt a rush of affection that he would risk his silk lining for my friend’s comfort. Levi was not one to throw himself in front of tanks, but I think he was even more concerned with Ildiko’s safety than his own.

  Waiting for Pali to arrive and enjoying the tableau of my friends, I felt a moment of clear, perfect joy. Perhaps I already knew that it was an in-between time, a suspended bubble that I would have to pop.

  No-one shall expel us from this paradise.

  It was pure selfishness, my happiness; I knew this. Things have been so much harder for the others. For Ildiko’s family it has been a daily struggle for years: both her parents lost their teaching jobs in the twenties with the Jewish laws. Her father, especially, never really recovered, and for some years has been effectively an invalid, reliant on Ildiko and her mother. Ildi played it down and talked as though her deprivations were some kind of game, making clothes out of old tablecloths from her mother’s dowry box and working by candlelight when the electricity ran out. But it was no paradise: you could sense the desperation
as soon as you walked into their apartment on Dankó utca, the ice box by the front door emitting a rank smell and the three of them sleeping together in the room that doubled as a living room, Ildiko’s books stacked on the only spare space at the kitchen table. It always gave me such a feeling of guilt for my own comfortable existence. And amazement that every day Ildi could emerge from such a home fresh and beautiful.

  And poor Tibor. Not that he has suffered physical deprivation, living with his parents and sister in a lovely home in the Castle District. His family, though not as wealthy as Pali’s or Levi’s, were in a private business and relatively unaffected by the Jewish laws. But Tibor is not one to be contained or immobilised; he needs to be out in the world, building things and doing good. Action and progress, the very things from which we have been cut off by all the rules and the employment laws. Hence, I suppose, all the risky meetings he attends, dog-eared copies of the Manifesto passed around between twitchy young men. Shouting into the void, Come and get me if you will. Hence also, I think, Tibor’s preoccupation with Pali, which became over time a receptacle for all his frustration, his need to do something. But I am coming to that: it leads me back to the afternoon at the statue, when things started to change.

  I said that it was an ordinary afternoon, but it wasn’t quite, because of the long-awaited letter from the professor. It had been about two months, and I know that Tibor had started to worry that he had made a faux pas by bringing Pali into it. The professor’s original letter had been addressed only to him, to Tibor – when he was younger he won a student competition with an extension of the Hasse principle, and apparently it was still out there in the world, circulating in blithe unconcern about our ignominy. We had not heard of this Professor Voigt, who wrote with such hypnotising flattery (one line that stands out in my memory was about how heartening he found it that the youth of today, about whom one heard such unpromising things, could impress him with insight into a topic he had researched for ten years). It was not surprising that we hadn’t heard of him, exiled beyond the respectable pale of academia as we were. The others, especially Tibor and Ildiko, tried to keep up with the latest research, but inevitably we were working in the dark. At any rate, this professor held a position at the university in Vienna and wrote with an obvious sense of his own importance in the field of number theory, and these kinds of lifelines were not often extended. He said he would be happy to see some more work, if we had anything new we would like to disseminate. Of course, he meant if Tibor had anything new, but Tibor presented the offer as though the professor had approached us all together.