“I miss Europe so much!”
“You’re nostalgic for a world that no longer exists, Adele. I’m afraid your trip is going to be a big disappointment.”
Kurt took my arm. I read it as a warning rather than a sign of tenderness.
“Our life is now here. We will apply for American citizenship.”
“Even if you are offered a good position in Vienna?”
“The question won’t arise.”
“Adele, what do you think?”
“I’ll go where he goes.”
“You’re the wisest of us all.”
I gave Albert his briefcase back. He hadn’t remembered that I was carrying it for him.
“Tell that to the bureaucrats in charge of emigration! Gentlemen, I’ll leave you here. I have some errands in town, and I have to buy a bottle of milk of magnesia. I’ll come back to visit with Maja this afternoon.”
They had stopped listening to me. The brown head and the white were bent over a stratospheric conversation in which I had no place. I’d imposed on them too long by my presence already. For my man, this friendship was precious, a lifesaver. It was not for me to meddle in it any further. I left them and went my way, having plenty to keep me busy. I had a trip to prepare.
33
At the appointed hour on the appointed day, in an astrakhan toque with her cheeks rouged, Adele lay in wait for her accomplice. She asked Anna to help her slip on a peacock-blue coat that would make them detectable a mile off. The young woman didn’t have the heart to refuse. It must have belonged to an earlier life. Mrs. Gödel counterfeited a sleeping body in her bed by leaving her turban sticking out of the covers—less on the theory that it would actually work than out of nostalgia for her mad youth. Gladys stalked up and down the hallway with a conspiratorial air. Adele scolded her, and she adopted an attitude of normality, which was even less convincing.
Jack met them as promised by the ivy-covered gate and installed the elderly woman in the car while Anna hid the wheelchair behind a bush. The fifteen miles to the movie house seemed interminable. Adele smiled incessantly at the young woman behind the wheel, indifferent to her anxiety. Anna, unused to seeing Adele so animated, imagined all the worst possible consequences of her risky plan. Her back ached and her temples pounded. All this to spend three hours with Julie Andrews. Anna had never liked the big ninny. Mary Poppins still gave her nightmares.
The County Theater, a recently renovated neighborhood movie house, had kept its illuminated marquee with the big black letters in a crooked line. If it hadn’t been for the fast-food joint with its aggressive neon display next door, Anna might have thought she was back in the 1950s. When Adele saw the film’s title, which Anna had wanted to surprise her with, she didn’t hide her disappointment. She had seen The Sound of Music when it came out in 1965. “The Americans sweetened our history just the way they do their coleslaw. It disgusted me.”
When she had settled Adele in her narrow seat, Anna started to breathe normally again. Only then did her mind, fixated on operational details, finally grapple with the one fundamental problem that had slipped her notice: this musical comedy was set against the backdrop of the Anschluss. Mortified, she attacked the vast bucket of popcorn Mrs. Gödel had insisted on buying as they entered.
“You’re not too tired?”
Adele shoved the container onto her lap. “I hate people who talk at the movies!”
Anna suppressed her irritation by looking around the audience. The last person she wanted to see was a staff member from Pine Run out on a spree. She could relax. The seats were almost empty: a young couple looking for a dark corner and a row of giggling teenyboppers.
She sat silently through the endless title sequence—an aerial view of the Tyrolean peaks, with lots of greenery and church steeples, leading to the first deafening trills of Julie Andrews in an apron, her hair in a Joan of Arc cut. Adele fingered the notes happily on the armrest. Anna wondered how long she could stand it. She had never watched this clunker through to the end, always falling asleep before the intermission. She turned around: the two lovebirds were climbing over each other. The schoolgirls whispered animatedly back and forth, having dismissed the nuns in their Austrian wimples. Anna dove back into the popcorn to dull her boredom. She knew the story: Fräulein Maria, a flighty novice at the convent, takes a post with Captain von Trapp as the governess for his seven boisterous brats. Anna smiled, feeling a hand on her own. Adele would likely have made a good mother, she should have had a string of little mathematicians of her own. As for herself, Anna was planning not to have any children, unless things took a very different turn. And especially not a daughter. What could she teach her? She hadn’t known her maternal grandmother, but the myth was all she needed: an upper-middle-class woman from Stuttgart who kept to her bed until noon, from where she terrorized her whole household. Anna imagined her ancestral line as a set of nesting matryoshka dolls: from generation to generation, the women in her family handed down their neuroses. In the Paleolithic, a hirsute Rachel was already reproaching her scruffy husband for the meagerness of his hunting.
Captain von Trapp, played by Christopher Plummer, was surprisingly seductive, despite his thick layer of pancake makeup. When it came to matinee idols, she preferred George Sanders with his cocksure expression. A charming little dance on the screen suddenly reminded her of her dance lessons. She straightened her back reflexively. She hadn’t been built to wear a tutu. Madame Françoise had admitted there was no point in torturing a student as stiff as Anna, but Rachel had insisted. She had made her daughter spend long years practicing before finally allowing her to take swimming lessons instead. In the water, no one sticks a dictionary on your head.
Striding through the gleaming streets of Salzburg, the tireless Fräulein Maria teaches the children music: “Do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do.” Anna had to admit that, despite the insipid words, the tune was engaging. To pass the time, she started to pay attention to the framing of the shots and was surprised to find a certain graphic beauty in them. Had she suddenly gone soft? Mrs. Gödel was humming along unabashedly. If the older woman was happy with the choice of movie, she would never admit it. Anna endured more than an hour of Technicolor cheeriness without a murmur, until the captain started to croon “Edelweiss, edelweiss” in such fatuous tones that she snorted. Even Adele could no longer stand it. “They didn’t skimp on the whipped cream! And those ghastly hairdos! We didn’t dress like that back then.”
The governess and Herr von Trapp were waltzing across the screen. Too much gelatin, too much edelweiss. Anna fell asleep.
She woke up with a start. The von Trapp family was crossing the mountains toward Switzerland on foot. Once again, Anna had missed the Anschluss. Adele was watching her, a smile on her face. The resurgence of the ugly past under a layer of schmaltz seemed not to have disturbed her in the least. “What is more pleasant than to sleep in a movie theater?” Anna made a superhuman effort to return to reality. The second part of the ordeal was about to begin: getting Adele home.
Night fell as they were exiting the theater. Anna looked at her racing watch. She hoped that Jack would keep his nerve and not sound the alarm if they were late. Mrs. Gödel had insisted on savoring the film down to the last line of the credits. The teenagers horsed around on the way out, covering their embarrassment at having been moved by this old warhorse. The couple were sharing a cigarette. Adele bummed one off them while her minder looked on in panic. Drawing deeply on the cigarette, she said, “I count on you to say nothing to my parents.”
Anna resisted the temptation to smoke, although the cigarette after a movie was one of her favorites. Mrs. Gödel looked dreamily at the poster for The Shining. The young woman stiffened—she was determined not to go twice on an expedition like this.
“It’s a horror movie, Adele.”
“Even mummies have the right to be scared! You know, I could have met this fellow Kubrick if Kurt had ever stepped away from his blackboard for even a minute.”
&nbs
p; Anna forgot about her watch.
“Mr. Kubrick was writing a screenplay about artificial intelligence, or space travel, I don’t remember exactly. Kurt never answered his letters, and Kubrick, who lived in London, refused to travel! The two of them were obviously never meant to meet.”
“Kurt Gödel in the credits for a science fiction film! I have a friend who would love that story. He’s obsessed with 2001: A Space Odyssey. I never managed to watch it all the way through.”
Adele squashed her cigarette end with the tip of her cane.
“As I understand it, you must have missed quite a number of end credits. And who is this friend you are talking about?”
34
DECEMBER 5, 1947
So Help Me God!
I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic … so help me God.
—From the Naturalization Oath of Allegiance to the United States of America
“Where are they? We’re late!”
“It’s less than a half hour to Trenton. You’re more nervous than you were before your thesis defense, Kurtele.”
“This is an important day. We mustn’t make a bad impression.”
A pale yellow automobile drove up the street and honked, drawing to a stop at our feet. Morgenstern was behind the wheel, and Albert’s bushy head emerged from the passenger side.
“How elegant you look, Adele! You are a credit to your new country.”
I turned in place to allow myself to be admired: a coat embroidered with chenille, kid gloves, and a black cap.
“You might have worn a tie, Herr Einstein.”
“Gödel, whatever J. Edgar Hoover may think, I have been an American citizen since 1940. I’ve earned the right to walk around wearing what I like. I intended to go in a bathrobe, but Oskar vetoed the plan.”
Kurt blanched in retrospective horror. Given his contempt for propriety, Albert could perfectly well have done it. Morgenstern invited us into his car. His tall, tweed-clad figure clashed with the bohemianism of his illustrious passenger. We sat in the backseat of the sedan. The trip had the slightly festive feel of a students’ outing. Only Kurt was tense. He had asked his two closest friends to stand in as character witnesses at the ceremony. Seven years after our arrival in the United States, we were applying for citizenship. A model student to the marrow, my husband had been preparing for the exam for months. Although Oskar had told him that the effort was unnecessary, he had applied himself to studying the history of the United States, the text of the Constitution, and local and state politics down to their tiniest details. He quizzed me every night at dinner, less concerned about whether I would pass than about my enthusiasm for the subject. I had even had to learn the names of the Indian tribes. Thanks to his pathological need for perfection, he had every answer down.
“So, Gödel, have you studied properly?”
Einstein was enjoying his younger colleague’s anxiety. After all these years, he still took pleasure in playing with Kurt’s nerves. Oskar, who had often had to pick up the pieces, was concerned to keep his friend in a good frame of mind.
“You know how thorough he is, Professor. Gödel could point out a thing or two to a doctor in Constitutional law. Which is not the point of the interview. The exam is a formality, not a thesis presentation. You do agree with me, don’t you?”
“I’ll answer any questions they put to me.”
“Right. Just the questions.”
“And if they ask me about it, Herr Einstein, I’ll have to tell the truth. I’ve found a flaw in the Constitution!”
I smiled at seeing both men stiffen.
“No, no, and no, Gödel!”
“It strikes me as pertinent! The American Constitution has procedural limits but no fundamental ones. Consequently, it could be used to reverse the Constitution itself.”
Albert turned in exasperation toward the backseat and barked at my husband’s obdurate face.
“By the hair on God’s chin, Gödel! No one in this car doubts the acuity of your logical thinking. But you do realize that criticizing the American Constitution to an American judge will make him less likely to grant you American citizenship!”
“Don’t get excited, Herr Einstein. Think of your heart.”
Albert drummed exasperatedly on the teak dashboard. He was avoiding smoking on account of his sensitive friend. Kurt was a rotten student in the logic of common sense. Furthermore, he hated being wrong, whatever the subject. I had made my choice: to be an irreproachable member of a community of sheep, you have to become a sheep yourself. At least for a few minutes. For his part, he refused to submit without a quibble to this humiliating exercise where he had to surrender his intelligence to the law, though he was completely unable to mobilize his talents for the public good. Unlike Albert, his rebellion never surfaced outside the realm of theory.
“You may be right. At least in appearance.”
“Be diplomatic! That’s all we ask of you. And for Christ’s sake, roll up that window.”
“The exam is dead simple, Gödel. They are going to ask you about the color of the American flag and things of that sort.”
“Ask him a difficult question, gentlemen! My husband loves to play games when he is sure of winning.”
Kurt closed his window and settled against the backrest.
“I’m waiting.”
“On what day do we celebrate Independence?”
“Harder. I’m not in kindergarten.”
“I know! On the Fourth of July. We celebrate our freedom from British subjugation.”
“One point for Adele. Who was the first president of the United States?”
Kurt listed the presidents in chronological order from George Washington to Harry Truman. He could have given the date they entered office and the length of their terms. Einstein cut him off before he launched on a detailed biography of each.
“Who will be our next president?”
My husband thought he had missed a fact. I jumped in, happy to lighten the mood.
“John Wayne!”
“An actor for president? What a strange idea, Adele!”
“Did you see They Were Expendable? I adored that movie.”
“Let’s stay serious. You should ask my wife questions about how the government is organized. There are gaps in her knowledge of the legislature. Speaking of which—”
“Enough, Gödel. What are the thirteen original states, Adele?”
I recited my catechism, but with the slightest hesitation. Kurt leapt at the chance to prove how tenuous my knowledge was. This was a kind of fact I never stored in my memory for more than a few weeks. I didn’t like to burden myself with useless baggage. Kurt had been working at mental retention since he was a toddler. Fortunately, Albert came to my rescue.
“Adele, why did the pilgrims leave Europe?”
“Because of taxes?”
“Possibly. British cooking would have been enough to make me run away.”
“To practice their religion freely. You really have no respect for anything.”
“Don’t be such a Puritan, my friend. You’re not yet an American citizen.”
Albert questioned Kurt about the basic tenets of the Declaration of Independence. It was a piece of cake. He had learned the text by heart and explained the beauty of it to me. Then I was questioned about the basic rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly—values that the black years in Vienna had made us forget. I had not made use of any of them since arriving in America, not even the most exotic freedom: the right to own a gun.
“How many times can a senator be reelected?”
“Until he is mummified?”
“Correct. But formulate your answer mor
e appropriately, Adele.”
“One last question for the road. Where is the White House?”
“At 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.”
“You’re a walking disaster, Gödel. My next present to you will be a muzzle!”
“I don’t know as much as he does.”
“Don’t worry. By tonight, you will be an American citizen.”
An American. Who could have imagined that one day I would give up my nationality, my language, and my memories to petition a foreign government for naturalization? I watched the tidy streets of Princeton flash by as I thought of the streets and roads I had traveled for seven months across a dying Europe.
I had hared around in every direction to visit my family and to bring reassurance to Kurt’s, helping them to the extent that we could. I had knocked on Lieesa’s parents’ door. Her father had not recognized me. He claimed never to have had a daughter, but at the sight of a few dollars his memory returned. Lieesa had left Vienna in the wake of the Nazi troops. She’d gotten knocked up by a German officer. His whore of a daughter had probably wound up in a ditch, her ass in the air, the way she’d spent most of her life. I took a taxi to Purkersdorf without much hope. The sanatorium was still standing; the war had brought to its doors a fresh quota of loonies. The surviving staff had had no news of Anna since she had left to be with her son, and no one had her address. I made inquiries at the Red Cross and the American relief organizations, but in vain. The bureaucracies were in chaos. Who had time for a cabaret dancer and a redheaded nurse when thousands were mourning the loss of their loved ones? I lit two candles for them at the Peterskirche. Across the street, the Nachtfalter was still in business. Now it catered to GIs looking for distraction. Other dancers would try their luck with them. Lieesa had backed the wrong horse. Anna had never had the wherewithal to place a bet.
It was my responsibility to sell our Viennese apartment as well as to get damages for the villa in Brno that had been requisitioned during the war—a further bureaucratic puzzle. After years of anxious isolation, the activity brought me back to life, but my compatriots’ distress was a constant agony. Vienna had been ravaged by the Allied bombing—even its historic center, where the Opera had been destroyed by fire. The arrival of the Soviets in April 1945 had provoked an orgy of violence in the way of rapes, fires, and looting. The dying city, which had no police force and no water, gas, or electricity, experienced a second wave of pillagers shortly afterward, this one native. American troops had rejoined the Red Army, and the two forces were now quarreling over the last shreds of my blood-drained city.
The Goddess of Small Victories Page 21