The Goddess of Small Victories

by Yannick Grannec

  “If you mean will I drop off three crates of documents on your doorstep tomorrow, then no, I haven’t made any progress, sir.”

  Calvin Adams rose to stare down at her from his full height.

  “Do I detect an edge of aggression, Miss Roth?”

  She made herself shrink. She mustn’t antagonize him. She had already seen him fly into a rage.

  “I apologize, really. It’s just that I’ve been working so hard.”

  “Then get some help. I’m not a torturer, damn it! You don’t have to make those geriatric visits every three days. We have enough to keep us busy right here. We have a delegation from Europe about to arrive. I’ll need your skills as a translator.”

  “That’s not my job.”

  “I’ve discussed it with your father. You need work that brings you into closer contact with people. You’ve spent too many years in the company of old papers.”

  The young woman had always expected her father to poke his patrician nose into her business one day or another. Princeton’s motto, engraved above the entrance to the library, reminded her of it constantly: Dei sub numine viget, “Under the protection of God she flourishes.” Under her father’s omnipotent eye, she had wilted.

  “I’m very grateful to have been offered the position, even knowing that I owe it to my father.”

  The director unbuttoned his blazer and shoved his chair back. Anna’s world was full of furniture on wheels.

  “We’re among ourselves here. George and I are old friends, and his concern is perfectly legitimate. I would do the same for my own son.”

  “We were talking about Mrs. Gödel.”

  The director’s mention of Leonard had left her drained. Especially here in this office where, twenty years earlier, Leo had offered her his collection of Strange comic books if she would pull down her panties. Both their fathers were in the next room, deep in discussion, but she’d had the time to give him a furtive glimpse of her privates behind the padded door. Not because of his comics, which were stupid, but for the pleasure of taking his dare.

  “If the business drags on, there’s no point in wasting more time on it. I have still another Einstein biographer to cope with and a dozen lectures to prepare.”

  “Mrs. Gödel has assured me that she didn’t destroy the documents.”

  “That’s an excellent start. You need to convince her at this point that we’re acting in good faith.”

  “It’s not so simple.”

  “All the same, you’ve managed to soften her up. Congratulations.”

  Anna had had no choice, she’d had to throw Adams a bone or he would have put her on a new assignment. He now came to the real purpose of their interview, fingering the gold buttons of his blazer in a familiar sign of embarrassment. To the extent, at least, that he was capable of showing sentiment.

  “I’m counting on you to join us for Thanksgiving dinner. Virginia will be delighted to see you again. We have two or three Nobel Prize prospects joining us, a Fields medalist, and an heir to the Richardson fortune.”

  “You’re very kind, but I never feel comfortable at this sort of gathering.”

  “It’s not an invitation, it’s a summons, Miss Roth! I haven’t got an interpreter who can come that night, and that damned French mathematician mangles his English so badly I can barely understand a word he says. I need your talents. And you will make an effort to look presentable, won’t you?”

  Anna wondered whether he would deliver the final thrust by reminding her of her mother’s legendary elegance. He stopped short. The shadow of her father was enough to give the conversation weight. Having to share Thanksgiving dinner with Leo would be the last straw. She rose and took her leave, the urge to scream rising in her. She would wait until she was safely in the shower. Princeton’s manicured lawns were generally unreceptive to fits of hysteria.

  From his office window, the director watched the slender figure retreat. He had never understood her as a child, and he had no more insight into her now that she was a young woman. He felt a tightening in his pelvis at the thought of the girl who, thirty years earlier, had sat next to him during a reception for Princeton students. Austere Anna was her exact opposite. Rachel had been irresistible, a brilliant student with delectable breasts. As he and Rachel were already committed to other partners, they had shared just one, frustrating dance. He scratched his crotch. Times were different. Nowadays, he could have asked her out for a drink. He shut the door and allowed himself a little liquid solace to erase the vision of creamy thighs and breasts like basketballs. He’d have to tell his wife that Anna was coming to Thanksgiving dinner. Virginia didn’t like her, and she’d never liked Anna’s mother. With a little luck, his space-alien son might consent to join them. With even more luck, Leo might even be directed toward gainful employment by Andrew W. Richardson Jr. And if miracles still happened, Virginia might reach the end of the meal without getting crocked. But luck wasn’t to be trusted. He poured himself another belt before hiding the bottle and summoning his secretary.

  “Mrs. Clarck, I’d like to speak to Leonard right away. Call his lab at MIT and tell the receptionist to wake up the guy sleeping on the pile of empty pizza boxes.”

  14

  JANUARY 1936

  Necessary but Not Sufficient

  Hell could invent no greater torture than of being charged with abnormal weakness on account of being abnormally strong.

  —Edgar Allan Poe, “The Accursed Intellect”

  I wanted to believe, as his family did, that his first episode of depression would come to seem like just a bad incident. His health would improve when we were together, I was all he needed. Order would return and disorder recede. But after he came back from the United States in 1934, Kurt collapsed again and had to take a long rest cure.

  His second episode of depression started right after Hans Hahn died. His thesis adviser succumbed to an aggressive cancer shortly before Dollfuss’s assassination. Kurt was still at Princeton and felt horrible that he couldn’t be there for Hahn during his last moments. The disease killed Kurt’s mentor in just three months. Another father he hadn’t said goodbye to.

  Entropy, he could have told himself: the disorder in a system increases. A broken teacup will never glue itself back together. The universe is disorder, revels in disorder, engenders disorder.

  The Purkersdorf Sanatorium thus became his second home. I found myself having to wait for his rare outings. I was allowed a furtive embrace, dinner of a sort, and sometimes even a night at the movies with Kurt before he would rush off to his mother to show her the progress he’d made. His temporary leaves from the sanatorium were always in her hands. Redheaded Anna had persuaded me not to ask for more: “You have to be strong for both of you, Adele. That’s your mission. And be happy that you have a mission, since most people don’t know what to do with their stupid lives.”

  Kurt never spent very long in Vienna, where the perpetual stress sapped his limited energy. The university was being drained of its life force: Jewish intellectuals and those who failed to sympathize with the Nazis were being replaced by “good Austrians” who had declared their allegiance to Chancellor Schuschnigg, Dollfuss’s successor, and to the ruling National Socialist Party. Hitler, for all his disavowals, was preparing for the Anschluss; the hyena was already pissing on the border. Only Mussolini’s reluctance kept him in check. By now the intelligentsia were leaving Austria en masse. Kurt was losing his closest friends, and also the fertile environment that he needed for thinking.

  Despite his fragile health, Kurt blithely accepted a second engagement to lecture at Princeton starting in the fall of 1935. I stormed, begged, and threatened to break off our relationship, but he wouldn’t give in. His family and his medical team also tried in vain to reason with him. Although his own brother was a radiologist, Kurt was suspicious of doctors. He trusted only books. But when he started studying more medical texts than philosophical or mathematical ones, a return to the psychiatric ward threatened. There were numerou
s signs of depression over the summer. Rudolf couldn’t have ignored them, and he should never have allowed his brother to travel. Kurt was hardly eating at all, spreading his food in tiny pieces around the edge of his plate to hide his loss of appetite. He complained about his teeth and his stomach. He wasn’t sleeping. He didn’t even go to bed anymore. He never touched me, or if he did it was only in a parody of coupling, meant to end any talk of it. Kurt was naturally taciturn, but now silence was starting to inhabit him.

  Kurt left for America in the fall, leaving me to ponder my lack of influence over this weak, stubborn, and ill-cared-for man. A few days after arriving in Princeton, he felt himself sinking. In his last letter, Kurt wrote that Flexner had found him an American doctor who was recommending his immediate return to Vienna. By the time the letter reached me, he was already en route. Veblen, ever helpful, had seen him onto a boat bound for Europe and promised not to alarm his family. He did however send a telegram to Rudolf letting him know that his brother was landing at Le Havre on December 7. Kurt dragged himself in a near coma to Paris, where he telephoned his older brother for help. To no avail. He stayed in Paris for three days before finding the strength, I can’t imagine how, to travel by train to Vienna. Alone.

  I could never persuade him to tell me the story of those three days, but I know that they were extraordinarily painful. The few small details I obtained took years of prying. I’ll never know. I’ll never be him. Even today, I can only imagine his suffering: a man standing in front of a bed in the bad light of a hotel room.

  I see him folding and unfolding his clothes to keep his hands busy. Washing them and drying them on towels embroidered with the pompous monogram of the Palace Hotel. Going down to the dining room and ordering a meal he will never touch. The waitress is pretty. She smiles at him. He manages to say a few words to her in French. He returns to his room by the staircase in an attempt to measure time physically. He concentrates for a moment on the number of his room key looking for a sign. He opens and closes the door wondering if he is doing it for the last time, if he is taking off his jacket and sitting on this chair for the last time. He smells the faint trace of the room’s previous occupants lingering in the air. He reaches for his notebook, he opens and closes it, strokes the moleskin cover. He thinks back to the waitress’s smile. Immediately, he thinks of me, of our last meeting on the station platform. He can’t summon a distinct memory of my face. He says to himself: Strange how the most familiar things are sometimes impossible to describe. He thinks of Hans Hahn. He thinks of his father. Then he has an idea. Fleeting, it glides through his mind before vanishing into the depths: a carp on the surface of a turbid pond. There, in a chair that hurts his back, he sits quite still so as not to startle the thought. He doesn’t even try to open his notebook. He thinks that the thought is still possible, if he stays where he is and makes no motion. No disturbance to the muddy water. He remembers our last argument, my crude words, the kind you fling at a man like a slap in the face when he refuses even to breathe: “You’re a man, for Christ’s sake! Eat! Sleep! Fuck!” He doesn’t know how long he’s been in this chair. His back keeps a record of the passing hours, and he welcomes the pain. At dawn he shuts the window and packs his bag.

  As someone who would spend his whole life committing suicide, he could have cut his suffering short right there in Paris. No one would have been there to stop him. But he came home to Vienna and checked in to the sanatorium of his own volition. Why he renounced death isn’t explained by my love for him, nor by his mother’s love, nor by his faith. He must have been obeying another and far stronger injunction: the last struggle of his body against the anthropophagy of his mind.

  Perhaps I am condemned to see duality where there is none.

  One morning in January 1936, looking out through the clutter of my father’s shop window, I recognized Kurt’s brother on the sidewalk. I thought: Kurt is dead. Why else would Rudolf make the effort to contact me? Ever since Kurt’s disastrous return from Paris, I had lived in limbo. Kurt was in strict isolation at Purkersdorf, and even redheaded Anna could no longer help me see him. The meager information to be gotten from his nurses was far from reassuring. He refused to eat and, groggy from drugs, spent his days sleeping. I couldn’t face either of the two likely outcomes: that I would wait for a man who was locked away and had no hope of recovery, or that I would become a widow but without the right to wear mourning. I couldn’t even run away. I was just an onlooker at a train wreck.

  I sat down and closed my eyes. I heard the shrill tinkling of the doorbell, then Rudolf’s solemn greeting to my father. I waited motionless for my sentence.

  “Miss Porkert? Kurt wants to see you.”

  Rudolf had gone to all the trouble of seeking me out: if Kurt wasn’t dead, he was not far from it.

  “He isn’t well. He is refusing to eat anything. He thinks his doctors are trying to poison him. Would you accompany me to Purkersdorf? He needs you.”

  My father said nothing, having long since abandoned hope of saving his wayward daughter. My sisters bustled around upstairs, whispering and gathering my belongings. My mother dressed me tenderly: the sudden intrusion of the bald truth into a place where it had long been unspoken left me limp as a rag doll. For my family, Rudolf’s visit was proof of my importance to Kurt, this man about whom no one ever spoke, this ghost responsible for my disgrace.

  Rudolf drove me in his car to the Purkersdorf Sanatorium. During the long, awkward silence I was able to recover my spirits. I watched him out of the corner of my eye: the Gödel brothers had little in common, unless it was the stiff sadness at their core. He waited until we’d reached the outskirts of Vienna to make a few bland comments. We skipped over “why” and “whose fault is it,” instead exchanging information and making arrangements. Words without emotion. Kurt would have approved the objective tenor of our conversation: who would stay with Kurt and on what days. I would be introduced to the medical team as a close friend of the family. We would avoid any scandal. There would be no commotion, we would disturb him in no way. We would try not to break the last delicate thread. We loved a different person.

  Rudolf parked the car in front of the sanatorium. Despite the dirty winter light, the immaculate building displayed an insolent health. I had grown to hate its little geometric friezes, its imposing modernity, so powerless to dispel the patients’ troubled spirits.

  Rudolf sat motionless, his gloved hands gripping the wheel tightly. Without looking at me, he managed to say the words that needed to be said: “I should have gone to meet him in Paris.”

  I lightly touched his pale skin below the cuff of his leather glove. This man, too, was fragile, even if he didn’t show it. They are all fragile.

  “It wouldn’t have changed anything. You know that.”

  He stiffened at my touch. I lied badly: he should have gone to Paris to meet Kurt, but even before that he should never have let him go.

  “We won’t say anything to my mother about your being here. Kurt is in no condition to manage this kind of situation.”

  “I’m here for him. Don’t imagine that I consider this change of heart a victory of any sort.”

  I waited for him to go around the car and open the door for me. This time I would walk in through the front door with my head held high.

  His life, our love, the country’s future—everything was in confusion. I would have to straighten up this mess. I would have to bring order to his chaos if we were to ever have a future together. That’s the way I am: tell me that I’m needed and I’ll lift mountains.

  15

  The higher-ups at the retirement home denied Anna’s request to take Mrs. Gödel on an outing. A trip to the movies was out of the question, the staff barely managed to keep Mrs. Gödel’s pain under control. The old woman was living on borrowed time. Anna didn’t know how to break the bad news to her. She should never have made any promises. On top of everything, she’d fallen so far behind in her work that she’d had to cancel her last visit.


  Arriving at the half-open door, Anna hesitated for a moment. The room was dark, the curtains pulled shut. The air was stale, the smell made her gorge rise. She composed her face into a smile before entering.

  “I’m so sorry to be late, Adele. I ran into some problems on the way here.”

  The shape buried under the covers made no answer.

  “Were you asleep? I’m sorry.”

  “I am tired of hearing you always apologize for the rain.”

  Adele propped herself up laboriously on her pillows. Her mouth was drawn tight and her eyebrows arched querulously. Anna told herself she wouldn’t have the strength to clash swords with Adele, not tonight, after all the people bothering her at work, the flat tire, and the pimple throbbing on her chin. The last of the evening light was long gone, she was already thinking of the lonely, winding road that would lead her back to an empty fridge.

  “So what kind of behavior is this? You come every two days, then you don’t come anymore?”

  “I was very busy at work.”

  “I’m not in the mood to visit with you. We’re closed. No Nachlass on the Nachlass* today!”

  “Are you feeling unwell? Shall I call the duty nurse?”

  “You don’t have anything better to do than to play the part of a bloodsucker?”

  Anna guessed that Adele had learned she was confined to quarters and put her animosity down to that. Someone else had brought the news, but she would pay the price. She walked up to the bed holding out a bag of candies.

  “I brought some sweets. We won’t tell the nurse.”

  “You are trying to hurry up my death to get possession of those papers sooner?”

  “I was hoping to make you happy. I know you have a sweet tooth, Adele!”

  The old woman shook her finger at Anna. Her gestures and words rang false. She felt their dissonance without being able to correct them.

  “Don’t talk to me as if I am a child!”