Anna had used up her stores of patience. She stared at the rejected bag of treats.
“At least if you had children, you wouldn’t be here buttering up an old lady to earn bucks.”
“You have much to teach me in many areas of life, but that certainly isn’t one of them!”
“Bist deppert! Idiot! Don’t take that tone with me!”
“Mrs. Gödel, I like you a lot. Please don’t ruin everything.”
“I want to have nothing to do with your so-called affection. It is playacting! Lies!”
“I always take pleasure in seeing you, Adele.”
“You don’t know pleasure. You are a big joyless lump, with those claws for hands. You reach for life with tongs, at a distance. I think you kiss with your mouth closed. Would you even know an orgasm? You probably excuse yourself in bed constantly. In fact, no. You aren’t even frigid. You are simply an unfuckable virgin!”
Unfairness always had a debilitating effect on Anna: it numbed her will. She felt herself turn to stone, the color drain from her face, and she knew that giving vent to her anger in turn would do her a world of good. Adele, suffering from congestion, was turning purple, which had to be bad for her ancient heart.
“Raus! Out! I’ve dealt with my full share of cripples in my lifetime. Raus!”
At the sounds of commotion, a nurse entered the room.
“Ah! That’s all we needed. For this one to come clomping in like a peasant from the fields!”
“Mrs. Gödel, I’m going to give you a sedative now. No more visits for the moment.”
Anna fled, leaving the sweets on the bed.
She rummaged in her bag for a handkerchief. The vending machine in the hallway beckoned. She sniffed, breathed deeply, and found some change: she’d earned a treat. That Gödel woman had a lot of juice for an old bag living on borrowed time. Anna stifled another round of tears. The crazy biddy could be so wounding. You’ve won, you old witch! I won’t come back again! Why should she subject herself to this kind of treatment? She looked down at her trembling hands. “Claws”? Better not to dwell on the ugly things Adele had said. It wasn’t her fault if the authorities had turned down her request for an outing. And she was under no obligation to come and hold Adele’s kidney dish every day. She gobbled down the chocolate bar. Such a waste of time, all those useless visits. “Unfuckable virgin”? She hadn’t been a virgin since her seventeenth birthday. She was entirely average in that regard, she’d taken the plunge on the night of her prom with a boy called John. They’d both had too much to drink, and the experience—though disappointing—had allowed her to put the formality behind her. She remembered with more bitterness the corollary to this decision: her sudden and final break with her childhood friend Leonard Adams, who’d always thought that her virginity was his by right. They’d often talked about it: he would be gentle, and if he worked on his technique with other girls it was only so that she wouldn’t be disappointed. They’d been raised together, and they would grow old together. At fifteen Leo had already mapped out their way of life: his brilliant career, their house, their two children, and a home office where she could write whatever she wanted, because he had no doubt that she would be an artist. She hadn’t wanted to be his soul mate by default. She was more than a basic premise. So she’d chosen the chick magnet in her class to deflower her. Leo was in boarding school, and she had written him a detailed account of her adventure: he’d always favored her with a blow-by-blow account of his own conquests. She didn’t hear from him again for months. He was extremely touchy, and his prodigious memory helped him stockpile imagined slights. He could remind you years later of an innocent remark, analyzed to the last possible implication. He wasn’t about to forgive her for having cheated him of his due. “Joyless lump”? What did the old bat know about it? Had she even touched a man since Pearl Harbor? Others had schooled Anna in the subtleties later. None of the boys who made it past her apparent severity had ever complained of her coldness. On the contrary, Anna had a hard time getting rid of the little warriors, who’d no sooner shot their bolt than they wanted to park their slippers at the foot of her bed.
Once again, she hadn’t seen it coming; she was always being had. Adele Gödel was another of those embittered women just waiting to unleash their bile.
A blob of glittering pink entered her field of vision. She sighed. Gladys would make a fitting coda to this disastrous day.
“So, you had a little argument?”
“News gets around fast.”
“Adele can be mercurial. But at least she doesn’t hold a grudge. You’ll remember next time.”
“Remember what?”
Gladys put her manicured, liver-spotted hands on her hips. Anna thought she looked all too much like an ad for a golden-years Barbie.
“Today was her birthday! She didn’t have any visitors. Except you, briefly. And it’s probably going to be her last. About that, she has no illusions.”
The young woman felt herself flooded with a familiar sensation of guilt. How could she, usually so meticulous, have overlooked the date? She knew what would happen next: in another two minutes, she would start to find excuses for Adele, and a minute after that, she would look for ways to be forgiven.
*As well as meaning “archive,” the German word Nachlass means “discount.”
16
1936
The Worst Year of My Life
The mathematical life of a mathematician is short. Work rarely improves after the age of twenty-five or thirty. If little has been accomplished by then, little will ever be accomplished.
—Alfred Adler, “Reflections on Mathematics and Creativity”
Rudolf had gone ahead into his brother’s room. I was waiting my turn, sitting next to the mathematician Oskar Morgenstern, a close friend of Kurt’s to whom I’d never previously been introduced. While he couldn’t possibly have believed that I was “a close friend of the family,” he accepted the information blandly. Kurt, with his boundless capacity for suspicion, had told me that I could trust this good and phlegmatic man entirely.
“How is our patient, Miss Porkert? At our last meeting, he seemed so weak.”
“When they weighed him yesterday morning, he had reached one hundred and seventeen pounds. The doctor has set the bar for his release at one hundred and twenty-eight.”
I hardly dared to whisper; the elegance of the sanatorium’s lobby still intimidated me. Anna had told me lots of stories about the prominent Viennese figures who had stayed there. Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schönberg, and Arthur Schnitzler had come for a spell of luxurious rest, along with maharanis and millionaires of every nationality. Before the crash, of course! In 1936, the desperate rich were growing scarce, at Purkersdorf as well as in Vienna’s nightspots.
The austere sophistication of the décor tired my eyes. The architect, a certain Josef Hoffmann, had an unhealthy liking for checkerboard patterns. They appeared in the wall friezes, floor tiles, window frames, doorways, and even the hard-backed chairs in which I bided so much time. The façade, too, continued the rhythmic pattern of the window openings, which were divided into small squares. I have always needed softness and would have found comfort in neither the sanatorium’s Spartan rooms nor its severely geometrical gardens. The place was perfect for Kurt, however: clean, silent, and orderly. And Morgenstern, an elegant man who was reputed to be an illegitimate scion of the German imperial family, seemed perfectly at ease in this too-vertical world.
“You have been a great help to him, Fräulein. Kurt has told me as much. He is not a man to display his emotions.”
Oskar Morgenstern clasped my hands warmly in his, the one time in our interactions when this man actually touched me.
“Did you know that he has started working again? I brought along some recent articles that might interest him, especially those by a young English mathematician, Alan Turing.”
He could see that I was uncomfortable but mistook the reason.
“I didn’t mean to intrude on your private relations.”
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“We’re not allowed to bring him documents anymore. Someone who meant well smuggled in a letter from a certain German scientist, and Kurt stopped eating again for days. He became convinced that his work was being dismissed. And he interpreted it as a plot to keep him locked up indefinitely.”
“A man named Gentzen tried to disprove him, but Kurt’s theorems survived. His detractors hang on to Hilbert as to their mother’s breast. Turing’s work will interest him much more.”
“His reading is very carefully screened. We have instructions not to give him any books, or even pencil and paper.”
“That’s idiotic! To keep Gödel from working is to keep him from breathing.”
This was exactly my experience, too. Work was a life buoy as well as an anchor for my man. I looked over my shoulder to see if Rudolf was around. Kurt needed staunch friends, and Morgenstern seemed trustworthy.
“We’ve reached an agreement. I smuggle his belongings in to him as long as he keeps putting on weight. If he gets carried away, I confiscate his toys.”
The shock on Morgenstern’s face didn’t surprise me.
“You think it’s crude, but there was no alternative. Being force-fed and doped up on medication was destroying him. He deserves to have some semblance of control over his life.”
“Does Rudolf know?”
“He looks the other way. And he can tell that his brother is improving.”
“It’s wonderful that he’s working again. Has he mentioned what he is working on?”
I could hear no condescension in his question, I had been elevated from the role of bimbo to that of nurse. The promotion was welcome enough, even if I deserved a more official title. Still, I hesitated. How much could I trust him? Kurt had banged on so often about his colleagues’ jealousy.
“I’ve heard him talk about the first problem.”
“Of Hilbert’s program? Cantor’s continuum hypothesis? Is he still trying to show that it’s consistent?”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“Of course. Hilbert’s first problem. Kurt spoke of his ambitions at a talk in Princeton. The very import of his choice of research strikes me … But I’m straying from the point, I apologize. Here comes Rudolf, I’ll just go in and say hello to Kurt and then he’s all yours.”
I put my hand on his arm. “Herr Morgenstern? What is this program of Hilbert’s and what about it is worrying?”
“The subject is a complicated one.”
“I’ve been with Kurt for a long time now, and I’m used to not understanding everything.”
“Hilbert’s program is a list of tasks that twentieth-century mathematicians should accomplish. A series of questions that need to be resolved to shore up a portion of existing mathematics. Kurt has already partially settled the second question with his incompleteness theorem.”
“Then why is it a cause of worry to him?”
“Of Hilbert’s twenty-three problems, seventeen at least are still unanswered. Kurt has shown us that some certainties are forever out of reach. But as to which ones …”
“He could spend his life on it, and for nothing?”
“If anyone has a chance of resolving Hilbert’s first problem, it is certainly Kurt!”
“And the other problems?”
“If he had ten lifetimes it still wouldn’t be enough. In fact, I doubt they’ll ever be entirely solved.”
“That’s the sort of thought that haunts him.”
“Not at all! Don’t you see? Our friend enjoys the voyage more than the destination. You’ve made the right choice, Fräulein Porkert.”
He rose, leaving his seat to Rudolf, who collapsed into the unaccommodating chair, risking his back.
“The nurse can barely keep from throttling him.”
“Don’t let it upset you. He’ll have better days.”
Kurt’s brother buried himself in his newspaper. He sat up, cursed, and held up a page dated June 23.
“Listen to what this despicable ‘Dr. Austriacus’ has written in the Schönere Zukunft. He hasn’t even got the courage to sign his name to this garbage.”
He read the article from the progovernment Catholic newspaper in a low voice. I leaned in to catch the drift: “The Jew is inherently antimetaphysical. In philosophy, he embraces logicism, mathematicism, formalism, and positivism—characteristics that Schlick possessed in abundance. It is to be hoped that Schlick’s gruesome assassination at the University of Vienna will hasten the discovery of a truly satisfactory solution to the Jewish problem.”
He threw the newspaper into the wastebasket.
“What a rag! This will destroy Kurt.”
That’s how I heard the news: Moritz Schlick had just been killed on the steps of the university by an anti-Semitic student. Schlick, a philosopher and founding member of the Vienna Circle, was more than Kurt’s professor, he was his mentor and friend. How would Kurt take his death, coming so soon after Hahn’s?
“Hans Nelböck, Schlick’s killer, studied mathematics at the same time as my brother, and he also lived on the Lange Gasse.”
I shuddered. I, too, lived on that street.
“They didn’t know each other. But Kurt and I were his neighbors, our paths must have crossed at some point.”
“These madmen are destroying the last remnants of intelligent life in Vienna. The Nazis jumble together positivists, logic, mathematics, and Jews even if the whole thing makes no sense. Kurt is going to have trouble too, I’m certain of it. As soon as he’s on his feet again, I’m going to advise him to leave the city. Morgenstern has told me that he’s putting his affairs in order. He’ll be on the boat soon.”
“Kurt is in no condition to travel, Herr Gödel.”
“None of these people are going to forget him immediately. Their ideas are short, but their memories are long.”
“He’s had very little contact with the university these last months.”
“Nelböck received treatment at a number of psychiatric clinics. One way my brother might react to these events is to see him as his dark doppelgänger. It might be better to say nothing about this for the moment. What do you think, Fräulein Porkert?”
I was not accustomed to giving Rudolf advice. Yet I was becoming a key figure in the mix. If Kurt was finally recovering his health, it was thanks to my ministrations.
“He has his own way of interpreting things, especially those you try to keep from him. And lying always entails more lying.”
“Will you handle it, then?”
I caught sight of Anna crossing the lobby. She signaled discreetly that she was going to the back door for a cigarette. I decided to join her, needing a jolt of friendship to calm my long-suffering nerves. No sooner was he himself again than his family was already planning to send him far away from me. Anna couldn’t persuade his doctor to talk them out of it all by herself, but it was worth a try.
“I’ll do it,” she said. “It’s still too early to send him away.”
We had to keep the terrible news from undermining his recent progress. I had seen a fragile man set off for Princeton and return a shadow of himself. In the months after his journey back from Paris alone, Kurt had stopped eating. He weighed under one hundred pounds, and only my voice was sometimes able to rouse him from lethargy.
I had no training and no official standing, but I listened to the advice of redheaded Anna, and she’d seen plenty of others fall apart. I gave it everything I had: my sense of joy, of beauty. I opened the curtains to let in air and sunlight when the doctors imprisoned him in the dark cage of sleep. I had his gramophone delivered when they were recommending silence. I brought in the first flowers of spring. I spoke to him, without a break, when he was withdrawing further and further into himself. I lied about the state of the world, lied while reading the newspaper, lied about my own happiness. I talked to him about the early-summer fruits that we would eat together, about the lovely light that once again bathed Vienna, about the sounds of children in the Prater, about sweet Anna and her adorable
carrot-haired son. I talked to him about the sea, which Anna and her son had never seen any more than we had, and how we would all go see it together. I consoled him, scolded him, blackmailed him the way you would a child. I fed him, spoonful by spoonful. I touched his body, so changed from the body I had desired, with neither pity nor disgust. I listened to his ravings, tasted each of his foods, again and again, to prove that no one was trying to kill him. I kept my counsel about the one thing that was true: that he was poisoning himself.
I accepted his weakness, his self-pity, his entreaties, his disrespect, followed by his anger, which always brought the first words to his lips. Weak as he was, his mental powers suffered, and it weakened him further to see his mind in decline. His mind had been a scalpel, a perfect tool, and he was afraid of its becoming a dull knife. He was a magnificent but ever-so-fragile precision instrument. I cleaned his moving parts as well as I could. But the mechanism still refused to work. Though he was only thirty, he had the soul of an old man. He would say, “Mathematical genius is for the young.” Was he already past the age when insight strikes? That was the real question. He preferred silence to mediocrity. I had no answer to that, and no remedy for it, but having to choose between two poisons, I brought him his notebooks. I cried over it. I hated myself. But I saw no other possibility. I had to supply opium to an addict, to relieve him and intoxicate him at the same time. His doctor, Wagner-Jauregg, did something similar, inoculating his paralytic patients with malaria to rouse them from catalepsy. Evil to banish evil. What would the good doctor not have tried if I hadn’t made the choice I did? Electricity? Perpetual seclusion? I have heard time and again that mathematics leads to madness. If only it were that simple! Mathematics didn’t drive my man to madness—it saved him from himself, and it killed him.
Before going up to his room, I fished the newspaper out of the wastebasket and clipped the theater listings. It would give me something to discuss while I spoon-fed him his pap.
Sitting on his bed, a doctor with graying temples fingered Kurt’s wrist while consulting his watch. He looked me over with open and insulting lubricity. Kurt straightened up. I sat beside my man and waited for the doctor to leave before producing the clipping.
The Goddess of Small Victories Page 8