The Japanese are polite, but very distant. They don’t really like foreigners much. We are staying in a comfortable hotel with plenty of hot water. I only emerge from my boiling hot bath to poke around in the neighborhood, but I never stray very far. There are men in uniform everywhere. They let us know that “long noses” (Westerners) are not allowed to wander like that. Yokohama is a very large port, and meat is scarce. The people make do with rice and fish drowned in that horrible brine whose stink pervades the streets and even gets into our clothes. At a street vendor’s stall, I tasted a wonderful fried food called tempura. I stuffed myself with these vegetable fritters, which are as light as clouds. Kurt looked on disapprovingly: he doesn’t trust the local hygiene. But the boiling oil must kill everything off … He eats only rice and tea. This diet is kind to his stomach, which suffered from the food on the Russian train. He rarely leaves the hotel room, where he works.
We are in good health. I don’t know how we managed to come through all that cold without catching pneumonia. We said goodbye to the Mullers in Vladivostok. I hope they manage the crossing without any problems. The city, which is very close to the Chinese territory annexed by the Japanese, was full of armed men. It was terribly chaotic there. I often think of little Suzanna. The sight of a uniform always terrified her, even when it was only one of the train staff. She was so feverish when we reached Vladivostok that her parents decided to wait several days before resuming their trip, in order to find medicine for her. They have family in Pennsylvania, and I’m hoping to hear from them once we get settled in the United States. Kurt sends a kiss. I smother you under a great load of kisses. I miss you all so much.
Sayonara! (it means “goodbye” in Japanese),
Adele
The little girl would never reach Pennsylvania, I was convinced of it, just as I knew that my letters were useless. I wrote them to revive my optimism, which our long journey had dampened. I’d left all my loved ones behind. I had prepared myself for the pain of it, but I was discovering the added loss of giving up my daily routine: the comfort of eating my favorite foods, of opening the window and seeing a familiar landscape. The one thing I had left was Kurt, in all his weakness. I’d built my life around a single person. I still don’t know whether it was a proof of love or of total idiocy. How can two people survive on a partially gnawed bone?
VIA RADIO-AUSTRIA NO. 40278
SAN FRANCISCO. USA. MARCH 5, 1940
TO THE ATTENTION OF
DR. RUDOLF GOEDEL
LERCHENFELDERSTR. 81. VIENNA.
LANDED YESTERDAY IN SAN FRANCISCO. BOTH HEALTHY. TELL MOTHER AND PORKERT FAMILY. MANY KISSES. ADELE AND KURT.
March 6, 1940
San Francisco
Dear Ones,
We are finally in San Francisco, thinner but relieved … Our crossing of the Pacific was uneventful. After the darkness of Russia, the blue and green landscapes of Hawaii, where we stopped briefly, looked to us like paradise. My dream is to return there for a longer visit! I have been feeling landsick all day. The ground is still rolling as the boat did. It is very cool here. One of the passengers boasted of the California sun, but the fog in San Francisco puts Vienna in October to shame! Kurt has started to cough and complain about his chest. He lost a lot of weight during the trip. Once the endless formalities at customs were over, I dragged him forcibly into a restaurant. We ate a whole cow between us! The meat here is excellent. I’ll hardly have any time to visit the city, as we take a train tonight for New York. We are in a hurry to get there! It’s not true that I’m relieved, because I think of you all the time. We’ve reached safety, but your fate still seems uncertain. I long for your news. I long for Vienna. As soon as I get to New York I’ll wire you our address on the chance that telegrams to Europe are still getting through.
A thousand kisses from the other side of the world,
Adele
The coastline of America loomed before us at the last moment. A band of fog hid the city. All the passengers crowded on deck. Someone laughingly called out, “Land ho!” Someone else looked for the Statue of Liberty. Kurt patiently explained that we were making landfall on the United States west coast. New York harbor was still three thousand miles away. The man didn’t listen. He was happy. Then we were caught up in the bustle: the shouts, the lowered gangplank, the impatient porters. A few lucky passengers found open arms awaiting them. We disembarked knowing that nowhere in the sparse crowd would we see the face of a friend. We held tightly to each other.
For safekeeping, I had hidden our visas, vaccination certificates, and other documents in my girdle. I’d slept with them ever since Berlin. All the same, I was extremely anxious going through immigration. When the officer, following routine, asked Kurt whether he had ever been treated for mental illness, Kurt looked at him blandly and said no. So he knew how to lie. Then we testified that we had no intention of becoming American citizens. There, he was lying to me: he had already decided that he never wanted to go back to Europe. He had crossed out that life with a careful and deliberate line. End of proof.
We found ourselves walking down Mission Street, haggard and not daring to smile or even look at each other for fear that we would be called back at the last moment. And then the sun rose over San Francisco. My stomach unknotted. Suddenly I was overcome with hunger, an end-of-the-world hunger. We rushed into the first restaurant with a vaguely European menu.
25
The night before, Elizabeth Glinka had left a message at the Institute: Adele was out of intensive care. Her doctor had spoken in encouraging terms. The elderly woman’s state had not deteriorated. Anna, who had been climbing the walls at home for three days, headed to the retirement home after first going on a special errand.
She knocked on the half-open door. A radio was playing soft jazz. She was surprised to hear the usual “Kommen Sie rein!” ring out in cheerful tones.
“You’re not too tired for a visit, Adele?”
“I am immortal, dear girl. A tough old bird, the Gödel woman! I’m in much better shape than you. You’re all pale.”
Anna didn’t deny it. She had avoided looking at herself in the mirror that morning as she freshened up.
“A little snort of bourbon? That would set our heads straight. Don’t worry, I’ll stick with my intravenous drip. I don’t know what it contains, but I highly recommend it. Are you sure you won’t? A cookie, then. Elizabeth left me enough to feed a regiment.”
Anna waved the suggestion away. She was hungry but felt no inclination to eat. For weeks she had experienced no connection between the two feelings.
“Elizabeth liked you. She is one of the rare people I still trust, although she does have a tendency to blabber on. Please have a cookie! You are going to lose your skirt someday just walking around. Not that it would be any great loss!”
The young woman obediently took a cookie. It was too sweet.
“You were afraid that you would find an empty bed when you arrived here. And not be able to complete your job.”
Anna strenuously swallowed her mouthful of food.
“You know perfectly well that’s not true.”
“Sorry. To speak in that way is just a reflex with me. Mein Gott! I said ‘Sorry’! You must be contagious. Oh, turn up the sound! It’s Chet Baker. What a handsome devil he was! He used to drive me crazy. And when you see what he is now. I hear that he takes drugs.”
“Nowadays, everyone takes drugs.”
“People were playing with opium and cocaine in Vienna long before the war! Every generation thinks it has invented partying and disillusionment. Despair is never out of fashion, just like nostalgia.”
“Nostalgia is also a drug.”
“Poppycock! Lovely memories are the only treasure no one can ever steal from you. Besides, they hardly let me bring anything else here, except my radio. And I have to play it so softly! So as not to awaken the dying.”
She sang along to “My Funny Valentine” in her reedy, approximate voice. Her gaiety seemed suspect, in
fused through the drip line.
“Today, I am hearing only the melody. My ears are giving out. They make a selection all on their own. The music survives the words.”
“And yet you have lots to say.”
“I have a lifetime of silence to make up for, darling girl.”
Adele’s eyes suddenly fell on the small green leaves poking out of Anna’s handbag.
“Camellias! My favorite flower! You are a researcher who has truly done her homework.”
“I picked them on Linden Lane. The garden isn’t really being maintained, but it’s still very pretty. I wanted to bring you fresh news of your old home. You must miss it.”
“I haven’t felt I was at home for at least forty years. Since we left Vienna. I have always been in exile.”
The IV drip line was too short and the old woman couldn’t reach the plants. “Bring them closer before the witch in wooden clogs comes to take them away.” Her haggard face lit up as she inhaled the delicate aroma. The young woman took the smile as payment. She had rung and rung at the gate without getting an answer, then steeled herself to sneak onto the property. But she couldn’t think of any other present that would make up for her earlier transgression. Adele rumpled a flower between her fingers and brought it to her nose before saying, “They don’t have much scent, but I didn’t think they would still be flowering this late in the year.”
Anna took hold of a petal as well. The smell was too faint to overcome the cinnamon taste that saturated her palate. She slipped the petal into her pocket. She would use it as a bookmark.
“Winter is late in coming.”
“The weather! That is really a topic for old people! With Kurt, I avoided it like the plague. He was almost married to his barometer. Now it’s too hot. Now not hot enough. Too much wind. The greatest logician in the world? No, the most tiresome bore!”
“How can you talk about your husband that way?”
“They put truth serum into my transfusion this morning. The man ruined my life!”
Adele buried her mirthful face in the flowers. Anna had prepared herself to visit a dying woman and was hardly ready for these effusions. She considered for a brief moment explaining that she had firsthand experience of a similar pain in the rear. When he was six, Leonard could do long division in his head, while Anna was still struggling with the multiplication tables. At twelve he started offering comments on the work of his mathematician father, who developed second thoughts about having fed his son’s insatiable curiosity. Quick-tempered and alluring, Leo would accept no restrictions. Like the recursiveness that fascinated him, he answered to no one but himself. From childhood on, he had exhausted his parents and “bijectively,” as he liked to say, they him. The Adamses did what they could to impose the necessary discipline on their precocious son, but when the normal antagonisms surfaced in adolescence, Leonard truly became an alien. They sent him to boarding school where he might vent his ill humor freely. To the family’s great relief, his chaotic progress did not result in their hopes being dashed. In the end, Leo had entered MIT without any help from his father, except a genetic predisposition to mathematics.
Anna placed a soothing hand on Adele’s, to which the old woman responded by clasping her hand hotly.
“I have some advice for you, young lady. Avoid mathematicians like the plague! They squeeze you dry like a lemon, abduct you from everything you love, and don’t even give you a brat in return!”
26
SUMMER 1942
Blue Hill Inn
When a man of genius speaks of “the difficult” he means, simply, “the impossible.”
—Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia
However limited in truth human nature may be, still very much of the infinite adheres to it.
—Georg Cantor, “Foundations of a General Theory of Manifolds”
A gull’s cry nudged me from my troubled dreams. Pillows and comforter lay on the floor. The drawn curtains let a shaft of light into the silent room. Kurt was sitting in his shirtsleeves at the little writing desk. I walked up behind him to knead his shoulders.
“Can I open the curtains?”
“Leave them drawn, if you would. I have a headache.”
Groping my way, I restored a little order to the room. His raincoat, hanging on the back of a chair with his usual precision, was damp.
“Did you go out during the night?”
“I went for a walk.”
“Didn’t it help you get some sleep?”
“I have something on my mind.”
I gave myself a whore’s bath and got dressed without a word. He was sunk in contemplation of an engraving over the desk: a delicate dance of jellyfish.
“I’m going downstairs. If it’s all right with you.”
“Adele. I’m having problems.”
In fourteen years of living together, I had never heard him say anything like that. I wrapped my arms around him to inhale his trouble.
“What can I do, Kurtele?”
“Go and have breakfast.”
On the recommendation of his friend Oswald Veblen, we had taken a room in a charming, white clapboard inn surrounded by a sea of pines. We had already visited Maine the year before, staying with a colleague. Kurt had enjoyed the fresh, pure air from the sea. The flowering lilacs had reminded him of those in Marienbad. This time, Kurt had hardly left our hotel bedroom since we’d arrived in Blue Hill. At night, he would sometimes disappear on long, solitary walks along the coast.
In the hotel dining room, the vacationers made a pretense of not inspecting me. I ventured a timid “Good morning.” At that time, I was still having trouble making myself understood. I chose an isolated table near the window. The proprietress was talking in undertones with an elderly couple. About us, no doubt. The trio kept shooting me furtive glances. Mrs. Frederick wiped her hands briskly on her apron.
“Mrs. Gödel! How are you this morning? We don’t often see you at breakfast. But tell me about your husband, doesn’t he ever eat?”
“Speak more slowly please.”
She gave a meaningful nod to the other guests.
“Your husband?”
“He sleeps.”
“At night, I hear, he goes out.”
“He does work.”
“What kind of work?”
“Mathematics.”
“Can I clean the room?”
She spoke each syllable separately and distinctly. I wanted to stuff her apron into her slack mouth.
“I do it.”
“Housekeeping is included in the price of the room.”
She shrugged and moved away. Our eccentricities were only confirming her initial impression. When she checked our passports on arrival she had been alarmed.
“Are you Germans?”
“We are refugees from Austria.”
She looked at us suspiciously. Ever since the United States’ entry into the war, our visas no longer counted, we were potential Nazis. Kurt didn’t trust her either. At our first breakfast, she had watched, mortified, as he wiped and repositioned the silverware. In retaliation, she had poured his coffee on the table next to his cup. Later that morning, she had snooped around our bedroom. Ever since, he had refused to let her clean the room and stopped coming down to meals. The gossip flew behind our backs. We were foreigners. Enemies. We should have acted out a more convincing parody of normality.
How I missed Vienna! It was almost time for the grape harvest in Grinzing. People would be drinking Heuriger, the new wine. So different from that horrible drink the Americans adored, which tasted of cough medicine. I didn’t know whether the war had shut down the cabarets. I had no news from my family. The University of Vienna had addressed a formal request to Princeton University through the German consulate: Kurt Gödel was not to prolong his stay in the United States. He stalled for time by applying for a salaried position that would be less stressful to his weak heart. Moreover, he was called up for a medical exam by the American army. Frank Aydelotte, the director of the Ins
titute for Advanced Study, had had to write a formal diplomatic letter, saying: “Kurt Gödel is a genius. Unfortunately, he is subject to psychotic fits.” It bought us time, but how would we manage on his meager salary as a visiting scholar? What kind of career could he expect now that he wore the label “psychotic”? We weren’t welcome here. According to rumor, the American government was going to intern all Japanese residents in camps, even if they were American citizens. When would they do the same to those of German origin?5 Even before the war, we had made a detour so as not to pass in front of our consulate or even a German travel agency in New York. We were afraid of being brought in. The entire German-speaking community shook with retrospective fright over its escape and with anxiety over its future in a country at war with its native land. I had to learn English to break my dependence on this anxious-making circle. Somehow I couldn’t manage. Kurt reproached me with not trying at all. I clung to the word “temporary.”
I’d been so frightened during our long trip. I was still frightened. In September 1940, a submarine had sunk a transatlantic liner bringing hundreds of British children to North America. The Nazis were in Paris. They had attacked the USSR. The Japanese were carpet-bombing the Pacific. Every avenue of escape was closed. We were foreigners, imprisoned in an enormous country. Here, everything was huge, even the emptiness.
For Kurt, the future was a blackboard, newly erased. His lectures at Princeton and Yale had been warmly received. He seemed enthusiastic, even if the word had not featured in his vocabulary for a long time. He made a list of my resolutions. I could have made a list of his many lists: one for the things he should read, another for the articles he should finish writing, even one giving a schedule of his walks. He had projects, ideas—a future.
The Goddess of Small Victories Page 14