The Goddess of Small Victories

by Yannick Grannec

  “Reassure him, tolerate his oddities, but pay attention to the signs. Make sure he gets medical attention in time. And don’t forget to flatter him, even if you don’t have a clue as to how it’s done. Some men have such an insatiable ego that the compliments of a half-wit send them into raptures.”

  “Nothing about his favorite recipe and remembering his muffler in the winter?”

  Her nostrils tightened.

  “I believed for a long time that you would destroy his career. You won’t advance it, but you have allowed him to survive. I have to recognize one quality in you: you are unsinkable.”

  “It’s never too late to admit it.”

  “You are not without blame in Kurt’s … weakness. He needs peace. From what I have heard, you are a boisterous person. Concentrate on feeding him, protecting him, and not giving him dubious diseases.”

  She was a lifetime ahead of me in self-control. I shook my shoulder bag at her.

  “Don’t insult me! I could say a lot of things about where your little prodigy falls short!”

  “Kurt will always be a child. His intelligence will make him unhappy, lonely, and poor. It is my task as his mother to provide for his future.”

  “By finding a replacement for yourself? You’re forgetting one thing, Marianne.” I brought my face close to hers. “I’m the one who warms his bed at night!”

  I don’t know what shocked her more: that I called her by her first name, that I had the presumption to put myself on her level, or that I said those words. But in point of fact I do know. We lived in a time when it was our duty to coordinate our shoes with our handbag and never leave the house without gloves and a hat. I had the right to vote, but in her eyes I barely had the right to live.

  “Your vulgarity hardly surprises me, coming from a divorcee and a juke-joint dancer. Outside his work, Kurt has always had rather appalling taste.”

  “Not forgetting his taste for older women, Frau Gödel. You must have played some part in that!”

  She studied me impassively. I saw the she-wolf under the loden coat, ready to rip me to pieces.

  “There will be no children, will there? He never could stand for it. For you, it’s too late anyway.”

  I teetered on my too-high heels.

  “Will you come to the wedding?”

  “You have a run in your stocking. Kurt is very sensitive to that sort of thing.”

  She passed in front of me without even allowing herself a smile of victory. Not once had she called me by my name. There was an element of cliché to it. A woman and her mother-in-law are like two scientists arguing over the rights to a discovery. Every scientific advance issues from a womb, which is itself the fruit of another womb. We were the two sides of a coin: she had brought him into the world, I would likely see him out of it.

  I had wanted to bring her to the Himmelstrasse, our aptly named Heaven Street, to open the door of our home to her, but she marched off as soon as the “business” was done. Maybe I should have bowed my head and declared my allegiance to her too. My life with Kurt deserved more than a pact made on the sly in a cemetery. I was tired of all the unspoken and partial truths. I’ve always been bad at this game for which she’d received a perfect education.

  For consolation I went to visit the angel on my favorite grave. The statue had a man’s waist. Kurt and I had had an absurd discussion in front of this sculpture. Do angels have waists? Seated in prayer and surrounded by ivy, this one guarded the repose of an unknown family. We always greeted this figure on our Sunday walks. Kurt, too, liked angels.

  19

  Mrs. Gödel was putting her photographs back in their box, quietly watching the young woman, who could not bring herself to leave. The day had a feeling of finality that Anna was unwilling to accept.

  “Why don’t we get a cup of tea, Adele?”

  “It’s too late, they won’t serve you. They’re all too busy with their annual masquerade party.”

  “You don’t like Halloween?”

  “I hate false gaiety.”

  “Yet you like liquor.”

  Anna disciplined a strand of hair that was drooping at her temple. She needed a good shampoo. After this afternoon’s rain, her clothes gave off whiffs of old Labrador. She was within an ace of lying down on the floor and going to sleep. She tightened her ponytail. The sharp pain to her scalp gave her courage. She would have to steer Adele away from another fit of resentment. Truth seemed like the best option.

  “I won’t be celebrating Thanksgiving with you, Adele.”

  “I don’t wait at the window for your return, my dear.”

  Mrs. Gödel tortured one of the buttons on her loosely knit sweater jacket. Anna allowed her time to make a few small inner readjustments. Her heart swelled. Where was the smart young woman in the photograph? Anna’s compassion encompassed the old woman before her and the one she might herself become one day, with a little bad luck. She still had claim to the luxury of childish illusions: better to die than grow old.

  “I am a little rough at the edges sometimes.”

  “Thank you for showing me the photographs. That was very thoughtful of you.”

  “I was certain that you would like them. It doesn’t take much to amuse you, young lady.”

  “I don’t like those gatherings either. Too much food, too much family.”

  “I remember our first Thanksgiving in Princeton. The dean invited us to his superb house for dinner. The conversation was a complete blank to me. At the time, I barely spoke a word of English. I was fascinated by the abundance of food on the table. I hadn’t seen that since … Do you know, we had never seen anything of the kind. Will you take Thanksgiving dinner with your family?”

  “I’ve been invited by the director of the IAS.”

  “You stand in high favor with him!”

  “It was more like a summons to appear.”

  Anna poked a gap between the slats in the window blind. The puddles left by the afternoon rains shone with a warm light under the streetlamps. A group of shadows made their way in zigzags across the parking lot. The fateful dinner was approaching and she had not yet found a reasonable excuse to duck the confrontation with Leonard. There was a strong likelihood that he would appear for Thanksgiving—he had never missed a chance to poison a social occasion at Olden Manor.

  “Pine Run has made me hate all these so-called family holidays. You have only two options: either receive the visits of badly brought up children whose parents have somehow found the address of your retirement home, or go off and sulk in your corner expecting no one.”

  Anna didn’t ask if she was hoping for visitors. The guest book at the front desk had given her insight into Adele’s solitude. She abandoned her observation post.

  “I thought you liked children.”

  “I’m past the age where you pretend. The old are always pressing pictures of their descendants on me. Or they wave a postcard as though it were a revelation from God! They are pathetic. Take Gladys. Her son, as she tells it, is a combination of Superman and Dean Martin. Why do you think she is all primped up? Not to attract another old wreck, whatever she might say. She is making herself ready for a visit that is constantly being put off. Better not to have kids than to suffer their ingratitude!”

  “My mother, Rachel, claims that parenthood is a form of Stockholm syndrome. In spite of themselves, the parents develop an attachment to the children who are holding their life hostage.”

  “She has an unusual sense of humor.”

  “I’m not entirely sure it was meant as a joke.”

  “You should be more forbearing! You are fortunate to have a family.”

  Anna smiled; forbearance was her worst fault. She had renounced the benefits of a good adolescent crisis, wanting not to envenom further an already toxic divorce. In adulthood she did not allow herself to hate her parents as she would have liked. She loved them as she wanted to be loved herself: with constancy and without asking for ransom. She had persuaded herself that they were saving the
ir demonstrations of affection for old age. As their departure from this world approached, they would surely feel an irrepressible urge to touch her. They always turned up late for things.

  “One’s family can also be a poison.”

  “Especially among your people.”

  Anna stiffened. The allusion to her Jewish roots set off all her internal alarms.

  “I cannot talk about your family without being taken for a Nazi?”

  “I’m bothered by your prejudices.”

  “This is not a prejudice. Jewish families are somewhat suffocating. I had many Jewish friends. Most of the Princeton community were fleeing the war in Europe.”

  Anna twirled a strand of hair around her finger; she almost carried it to her mouth but her mother’s admonition, deeply anchored in her subconscious, stopped her: “Don’t chew on your hair! You look like a retard.”

  “Are you embarrassed? You mustn’t be! I’m no fool, the question has been buzzing in your head since the beginning. I can read your thoughts: That Gödel woman, if you scratch a little, has the not very nice makings of a good Austrian Catholic. Am I not right?”

  Leaving her hair alone, the young woman worried her lower lip. The story of the Jews in Europe, never discussed, had haunted her childhood.

  “A member of your family died in the camps?” Adele pursued.

  Anna repressed a painful feeling of nostalgia, remembering Grandmother Josepha and her gallery of photos of the beloved dead, the silver frames bordered in black. Her “Wailing Wall,” as her son teasingly called it. Dust on books in stacked piles; heat; the triple-locked door; apple strudel; the scraping of violin lessons; nursery rhymes in German: her memories formed an indigestible porridge.

  “On my father’s side. Two of his uncles didn’t manage to leave Germany in time. And lots of others, but not as close.”

  Adele made a gesture of helplessness. Anna, who had been ready to listen if not to forgive, felt the old woman’s casual acceptance as a slap in the face. This was her family’s history.

  “In Vienna, in 1938, you didn’t see it coming? You didn’t find the whole thing revolting?”

  “I had my own problems to deal with at the time.”

  “How could you not do anything? There were mass arrests and people being massacred.”

  “Is it excuses you want to hear? Shame? I can’t go back in time. I will not repudiate the person I was and still am. I wasn’t courageous. I saved my husband. I saved my own life. That was all.”

  Anna struggled with herself not to make any response. She needed Adele to be a person she could admire, a person of superior wisdom, formed by a fate beyond the usual. No one escapes the bell, the Gaussian curse. The all too mediocre truth was staring right at her. She would have preferred to hate the woman.

  “Don’t judge me. You don’t know how you would act if it was your back against the wall. Maybe you would be a heroine. Maybe not.”

  “I’ve heard that line before. It doesn’t work for me.”

  “I lost people close to me in the war also.”

  It was no excuse to Anna, especially an excuse of this kind.

  “Why should I be more to blame than Kurt? He acted no differently! Did his intelligence give him license to be blind?”

  “You’re hiding behind him.”

  “If you read his correspondence, you would understand just how blind he was. It made his friend Morgenstern smile. Probably to keep from shuddering. Kurt was preoccupied only with himself.”

  “Your husband was a coward?”

  “No! He simply had a great capacity to ignore things. He couldn’t stand any kind of conflict. Even if I had wanted to respond, if I had been able to get past my education, my fear, I could never have made him look squarely at life. All he had to do was raise the specter of Purkersdorf.”

  “He used his depression as an excuse?”

  “As a rampart against reality. Sometimes.”

  “And you went along with it?”

  “You want me to be both stupider and more lucid than he was! To be everything that he was not.”

  “I’m not demanding anything from you.”

  “You are looking for a nice old lady, maybe a little crazy, who says wise things while she sips her sherry. I am not that person, dear girl. Like you, I am a woman who has given up. You don’t recognize yourself in me because your resignation is recent. It’s a kind of lightness that only weighs on you with time.”

  “You’re wrong on my score. ‘Light’ is the last word to describe me. And if I had given up, I wouldn’t be here.”

  Adele grabbed her wrist, and Anna didn’t have the heart to pull away. She felt the life still pulsing through the big, liver-spotted hand. She hesitated a moment, but she did not lean in to kiss the old lady. She had no forgiveness to give. And no desire or right to give forgiveness. Their precarious friendship wouldn’t survive such a parody of absolution. Adele seemed to be drifting off already, or to be pretending to in order to avoid saying goodbye. Anna tucked her in carefully.

  Before she left, she pulled the blinds down and turned off the lights. In the hall she came across a couple that was clearly under stress: the man was carrying a sleeping child whose mouth was smeared with candy. In the woman’s pinched face could be read all the reproaches that she planned to address to the rearview mirror. The lobby was garishly festooned with garlands and the night nurse looked sour. No need to summon any special Halloween ghosts—everyone walks around with his own escort.

  20

  1938

  The Year of Decision

  Do you endorse the reunification of Austria with the German Reich, decreed on 13 March, 1938, and do you cast your vote for the party of our leader, Adolf Hitler?

  —Austrian referendum ballot, April 10, 1938

  The predawn sky, when I opened the windows, was as gray as on every other morning. I could hear the grape pickers calling in the distance. I lit the stove, humming a little song, made his breakfast—a cup of tea and a slice of dark bread—aligned the knife and fork according to his specifications. Everything had to be perfect. I took the liberty of drawing a horizontal figure eight with the plum jam. Hoping he wouldn’t take exception to it. I was exaggerating my happiness a little: it was my wedding day, the focus of many years of yearning. I poured myself some tea to settle my nausea. I shined his shoes, ironed his clothes carefully and laid them all out on a chair, attentive to the creases. My man’s clothes were sometimes more expressive when he was somewhere else.

  I’d banished dreams of a big church wedding with Vienna’s high society in attendance—I’d worn white once already. But this wedding, with its few guests, performed like a tiresome formality, had a faintly sad smell to it. Crossing the entrance hall, I saw a tired woman in the mirror. Was this the young bride-to-be? I took out my bobby pins and fluffed my hair. “Come on, girl, consider yourself happy and put the best face on it. Make the most of this moment, Frau Gödel!” I dressed before waking him with a kiss.

  He had given me a free hand with the wedding. I was used to that kind of decision making: “Take care of the details!” I was logistics, and logistics I would remain. Kurt was deeply absorbed in preparing his next course of lectures at Notre Dame University in the United States. After teaching for a year in Vienna, he had been given his university’s permission to teach elsewhere. He’d accepted an invitation from his friend Karl Menger in Indiana and another from Abraham Flexner at Princeton. His departure had been planned as far back as January, despite the uncertainties of this chaotic time. Kurt didn’t seem to worry about it. After a few months of euphoric concentration, reassured of having recovered his ability to work, he looked forward eagerly to leaving Austria.

  Our sudden decision to marry surprised my own family and the few close friends who knew about our affair. The “festivities” would not strain our budget unduly: the civil ceremony would be followed by a simple meal, attended by my parents, my sisters, and Kurt’s brother, Rudolf. The witnesses would be Karl Gödel, a
cousin of Kurt’s father, and Hermann Lortzing, an accountant friend. A person’s absence can, in some cases, be more humiliating even than their hostile presence: his mother declined our invitation. His closest colleagues, for their part, had almost all left Europe.

  We took the tram and met our friends in front of the town hall. We had made lunch reservations at a tavern right next to the government building, not far from the university and the cafés where Kurt had spent so many hours. It was the kind of detail Kurt appreciated: he would quit his bachelor student life and enter the married state all in the same neighborhood, without disruptions to his routine. Not that his familiar universe hadn’t changed. The façades were plastered with Nazi flags, and the heavy boots that tromped constantly through the buildings had made most of his friends flee. We were clinging, I realize now, to a Vienna that had vanished. It would take us both a while longer to realize it.

  We led our meager procession up the steps of the town hall. My parents and my sisters, who had overdressed, felt awkward in the presence of the stolid, bourgeois Rudolf. They kept their silence.

  I had invited neither Anna nor Lieesa to my wedding. I would have liked to query redheaded Anna about my blue velvet coat, in which I’d been caught once or twice in a downpour. She might have come with me to choose the little hat I wore, absolutely simple, gray with a ribbon, my one extravagance given our precarious finances. I borrowed a brooch from my sister, and I could have tapped Lieesa for her husband-catching stole. It had brought me luck, before the moths attacked it, as they attacked our memories. But my girlfriends inhabited two separate compartments of my life that history didn’t allow me to bring together. Not inviting Lieesa was to betray my youth. Not inviting Anna was to betray my gratitude toward her. But it was unimaginable, and in fact dangerous, to bring Anna, my Jewish friend, in contact with Lieesa. And both Kurt and I wanted the ceremony to gloss over our tricky pasts. Consenting finally to give me his name, Kurt had also passed on to me his worst feature, his inability to make difficult decisions—when, that is, the choice involved flesh-and-blood creatures and not mathematical symbols. Anna had made no objections; she understood. I brought her a slice of wedding cake and some candied almonds for her boy. Lieesa no longer spoke to me and hadn’t for some time. “Frau Gödel.” Now I was upper-crust.