Kurt had died rolled up in a ball on the chair of his hospital room. Alone.
What did he think about before letting go? Who did he think about? Did he call out to me? Did he reproach me for not being there? The one time that I didn’t come running. Only my body, this grotesque vessel, was at fault. My body had put me in prison. The moth had gone back to being a caterpillar. A huge larva, without arms to enfold my man one last time, without a voice to tell him, “It’s nothing, Kurtele. It’ll pass. A spoonful for the road, please.”
Did he die of malnutrition as they said? No, it was more a work-related accident: he was looking into uncertainty; he died riddled with doubt. He was the doctor who, investigating his own pathology, discovers that it can never be cured. Life is not an exact science, everything about it is fluctuating, unprovable. He couldn’t verify it parameter by parameter. He couldn’t axiomatize existence. What had he searched for that wasn’t in his heart, his bowels, or his sexual organ? He had decided not to involve himself, to place himself outside the world to understand it. There are systems from which we can’t exclude ourselves. Albert knew it. To exclude yourself from life is to die.
“Adele, I found this in a separate place, in a closed file folder.”
I examined the slender page: a series of signs, axioms and definitions, without explanation or commentary, as flat as a day without music. My gaze stumbled across the last sentence, fully spelled out: “Theorem 4: there is necessarily something that is like God.” What was God doing here? I reread the proof, since it seemed to be one. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the jargon. His damned logic again, which I had never learned to speak. Positive property; if and only if; consistent property.
“Is it important?”
“It must be a proof that shows … the existence of God.”63
Elizabeth read the page with and without glasses. She gave the paper back to me, perplexed, undoubtedly disappointed.
“We’ll put it under ‘Miscellaneous.’ ”
What lack of humility! What madness! How could he? What chasm had he come to? God must have been pleased to have him at His table! Kurt could make conversation with Him: “Hey, Pater! I’ve got a good one. You’re going to love this! I’ve proved Your existence.” Did God have a sense of humor? I was sure of it. Otherwise, we would never have met, Kurt and I.
I had to admit the fact that I was relieved. My string of blasphemies confirmed it. It was time for him to go. Our final years had ended in hell. How could I have stood to see him like that much longer? An unbearable caricature of himself, who went from being thin to skeletal, from being a genius to mad. Had it happened all at once, or had he strayed and gotten lost in the infinite border between those two essences? Lost forever in the continuum.
For all those years, I had managed to maintain hope. I had believed in possibilities. But when Oskar found him crouching behind the boiler, I gave up. I went into mourning for those possibilities. For the me that would never exist, for the him that he could have been, for what I would never be again without him. If and only if we had been others. I preferred keeping him in my memory: he wipes his glasses to get a better look at my cleavage in that tearoom in Vienna.
I’ve always eaten my black bread last: I had set aside two boxes marked “Personal.” Elizabeth and I each took one. There was no likelihood of my finding love letters inside. We had left them to burn in Vienna. I might find a few of my postcards from Europe or some of the photographs that hadn’t turned up earlier. But most likely they held letters from his liebe Mama. After all these years, why did it make me so upset? She had often been the focus of my anger. Presumably the old girl wasn’t to be outdone. Old girl. I was one of them now. Why worry about a dead woman’s opinion? The truth I’d always avoided was plain enough: I was her double, just a crutch.
“What should I do with this?”
Elizabeth was holding a pile of his constipation and body-temperature notebooks. She kept her tone light; she had cared for my husband without commenting on his quirks.
“I’d be happy to throw them in the fire, but someone would surely reproach me for it! These odd records were also a part of him.”
“I’m just thinking of the reaction of the person who finds them.”
“It will be a relief from all the rest.”
“You’re not afraid that he’ll be taken for—”
“Look at this, he kept the bill for our wedding lunch! I can’t believe he crossed all of Siberia with this paper in our trunks.”
“Maybe he was nostalgic.”
“He intended to present the total bill to me at the end.”
“He loved you so much, Adele.”
“Now that’s a good one. A bill requesting his membership dues for the Mathematical Society. Kurt hated debts. He would have been unhappy about this all his life. I should send them a check.”
“Save your money, Adele. You’re going to need it. I just found a receipt for something called Principia Mathematica.”
“It was his constant reading when we first met. Put it with his doctoral thesis in the box marked 1928/1929.”
I looked through some worn postcards. Maine, 1942. We’d bought them together and never sent them.
“Your German passports, which box do they go in?”
I opened his. He looked so young, he seemed a completely different person. The Nazi eagle had released its turd on the page. I gave both passports back to Elizabeth without even opening mine.
“The box for 1948, with the naturalization papers.”
“Good grief, Adele, how pretty you were! I’ve never seen this photograph before.”
I glanced for a moment at the yellowing print of a young lady posing, a vague smile on her lips.
“File it with ‘Miscellaneous.’ ”
“Don’t you want to keep it for yourself?”
“I’m not that person anymore, Elizabeth.”
“Of course you are!”
I continued sorting through the documents. I came across a letter from his brother addressed to the sanatorium: the 1936 box. An ocean liner ticket from Japan: the 1940 box. A heavy file with financial records for the mortgage on the house: the 1949 box. It had been paid in full and now had been resold. I was moved by a tiny piece of faded paper, a coat-check claim from the Nachtfalter: the 1928 box.
“There are still these letters from Marianne Gödel.”
I sighed. “I’ll have to read the whole thing.”
“You’re not obliged. It’s painful for you.”
“Would you leave me alone with them? It won’t take me long.”
“I’m going to finish packing your boxes. You really don’t want to take anything with you?”
“Send everything to the storage facility. You’ve seen the bedroom at Pine Run. There’s no room for bulky memories. Which is a good thing!”
“Should I call the IAS about the archives?”
“Not right away, Elizabeth.”
What had they found to write about over the course of all those years? She probably heaped a boatload of blame on me. He would barely have defended me, as usual. I’d never been able to inspire him, to stimulate his intellect. It wasn’t my role, and I didn’t feel any resentment about it. But had he granted her all the explanations he’d refused me? Had she had access to his light? That woman.
I opened one at random: 1951, congratulations for his prize. A letter dated November 1938, a month after our wedding, went on endlessly about political issues and sanitary advice. 1946: the situation in Europe, news of his godfather’s death. In 1961, she responded to his theological view of the world.64 He had explained it to her in detail, then. I feverishly unfolded one after another of her letters, absorbed in their revelations. Elizabeth stuck her head in the door from time to time but, unwilling to intrude, went back to her chores.
I found no trace of bitterness toward me. In forty years of correspondence, she never wrote about me once or even mentioned my name. The letters burned my fingers.
“Have
you finished, Adele?”
I turned my ravaged face toward Elizabeth. My first tears since Kurt’s death. She took me in her arms, rocked me without saying any useless words. I clung to her, drunk with a mixture of rage and pain. I was reeling with despair. My temples pounded to the beat of my frightened heart. But I didn’t want to leave. Not right away.
“I didn’t exist for them, Elizabeth. I never existed.”
When I calmed down, I extricated myself from her embrace. I painstakingly gathered the letters that had spilled on the floor and threw them in the fire.
55
Anna shook the snow off her clothes and her hair before entering the lobby of the IAS. She hadn’t expected this late cold spell; she was shivering in her lightweight beige coat. Nature would mourn in white today. She needed to think about putting away her cold-weather clothes. Since Adele’s funeral she hadn’t set foot in the office or given any reason for her absence. She hadn’t answered the telephone, hadn’t opened her mail. Her sudden reappearance would demand an explanation. As Adele might have said, “You can all go to hell!”
On that morning, Elizabeth Glinka had telephoned her. She was just preparing to visit Mrs. Gödel, as she had done every weekend since Christmas. “Miss Roth?” Anna knew what would come next. She had sat down to let the grief flood through her. She hadn’t said goodbye to Adele.
There had been so few people at the funeral: a few attendants with graying temples, eager for it to be over, supporting a handful of old ladies in black. Shivering, she had clung to Elizabeth’s arm. She hardly remembered the moment. The long car had brought the casket. Had Calvin Adams made a speech? She couldn’t remember it. She had thrown red roses onto the casket before it was covered with earth. She hadn’t found any camellias. The religious ceremony had been stiff and brief. Elizabeth had asked her advice about the music. Anna had suggested a Mahler song, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,” I am lost to the world, in homage to the Vienna that was gone. During the service, she changed her mind and thought she should have chosen James Brown, just to see Gladys bring life to the empty chapel with the shimmying of her black angora. Barbie had a black sweater. Why did this pathetic detail stick in Anna’s mind?
Adele was lucid to the end. The nurses hadn’t been able to understand her last words: they were in German. Anna was sure they were addressed to her husband. Since February 8, she had been lying next to him under the gray marble slab. On the pages of the open book, the words were engraved: Gödel, Adele T.: 1899–1981, Kurt F.: 1906–1978. From now on she would sleep on the left side of the bed.
The security guard at the IAS waved her toward him. He seemed as old as the building itself. Emerging from his usual silence, he expressed how happy he was to see her again. People had been worried about her. Anna had no time to wonder who was meant by “people”; the guard deposited on the counter a large package. She blew on her numb fingers and opened the accompanying envelope. The card, written in childish handwriting, was signed by Elizabeth Glinka. “I am sending you a present and a letter from Adele. Don’t be sad. She wasn’t. She wanted to go.” Anna smiled in spite of herself. She was sad, but the feeling would be bearable now. It was a sadness that came from accomplishment, not regret, the sadness you feel the day after a party. She hefted the package: no chance of its containing the Nachlass. It didn’t matter. She had already made up her mind to leave Princeton. This time, her protracted absence had not been a flight; it had allowed her to gather her strength, swathed in her red woolen cardigan. She would put her resignation letter on Calvin Adams’s desk in the course of the morning.
Anna had always believed in justice, order. For a time, she had thought that her mission on earth was to recover those papers. Adele had accepted her own mission: her God had created her to keep a certain genius from slipping away before his time. She had been compost for the sublime: the flesh, blood, hairs, and shit without which the mind cannot exist. She had been the necessary but not the sufficient condition; she had consented to be a link: forever the nice, fat, uneducated Austrian woman.
Today, Anna would have liked to tell her that she was wrong: in the continuum of dissolved bodies and forgotten souls, one life was worth another. We are all links. No one has a mission. Adele had loved Kurt; nothing was more important.
Her office didn’t smell musty, as she’d feared. “People” had aired it out and even brought in a green plant with a card: “Be well, Calvin Adams.” She was surprised at this mark of attention: at best, she had expected a final warning shot across her bow. She looked defiantly at the tray overflowing with messages. She preferred to start with the letter. She installed herself unhurriedly at her desk after having made herself a cup of tea. She sniffed the paper and imagined a hint of lavender coming from it. She repressed the welling of emotion; Adele wouldn’t have condoned her tears.
Dearest Anna,
I leave Kurt Gödel’s Nachlass to the Institute. I never considered doing any different. I have asked Elizabeth to have those crates delivered FROM YOU to the director of the IAS. It is not a present, and you are not in any way to take it as such! There is a time for everything, Anna: a time to hide in books and a time to live.
You gave me a great deal more than you could have hoped for even. My last thoughts will be for all the wonderful things that still lie ahead of you, and not for all those that I should be regretting. I wish you a magnificent life.
Your own Adele Thusnelda Gödel
The handwriting was firm, the letters deeply incised, but after the signature she had added a more spontaneous postscript, in which Anna felt her corporeal presence: “Vergessen Sie nicht zu lächeln, Mädel!” Don’t forget to smile, young lady!
Anna struggled to remove the complicated wrapping; Elizabeth was a very meticulous person. The package contained a pink flamingo made of battered cement. She laughed until the tears came. She set the bulky fowl on her desk, then upturned her handbag on the desktop. She didn’t have far to go to find it: Leo’s note was stuck as a bookmark in The Aleph, the book that had accompanied her on all her visits to Pine Run. She hadn’t finished it.
She unfolded the slip of paper; over a few lines of code, Leonard had scrawled some numbers in a bold hand, followed by “Insist, PLZ,” which was triply underlined. Anna looked out at the long, snow-covered lawn, mirroring the low, white sky.
Then she dialed Leo’s number, a series of digits without logical connection, but displaying perfect elegance.
Kurt Gödel, Groucho Marx, and Werner Heisenberg are sitting in a bar.
Heisenberg: “It would be highly unlikely, but I wonder if we’re in a joke.”
Gödel: “If we were outside the joke, we would know, but since we’re inside the joke there’s no way of telling whether we are or not.”
To which Groucho answered: “Of course it’s a joke, but you’re not telling it right!”
To my father, by way of farewell. Y.G.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my love for having believed in this work long before I did. Thanks to my children for having (from time to time) allowed me the leisure to write. Thanks to my mother for having given me a taste for books. Thanks to my brother for having introduced me to the world of geeks.
Thanks to Cheryl and John Dawson for their tremendous work and infinite kindness. Thanks to Stephen C., my editor, for his confidence and his prodding. Thanks to Simon D. for his luminous explanations of the continuum hypothesis. Thanks to Anne S. for her support of this book since its fetal stages. Thanks to Maxime P. for his ready enthusiasm. Thanks to Philippe B. for his Ping-Pong table. Thanks to Emmanuelle T. for all our girl talk. Thanks to Dan and Dana K. for their light. Thanks to Marinela and Daniel P. for their good vibes. Thanks to Thérèse L. for her how-strong-you-are theory. Thanks to Axelle L. for having been such a lovely inflection point. Thanks to Tina G., Martina and Alex T., Aurélie U., Katherin K., and Christian T. for their Austrian and German translations. Thanks to all the math lovers on the Internet: without you this book would
not have existed.
Thanks to Adele. I would have liked to meet you, Frau Gödel.
Author’s Note
While this novel is primarily a work of fiction, I have made every effort, out of respect for the memory of Adele and Kurt Gödel, to be scrupulously faithful to the biographical, historical, and scientific facts available to me. Specialists will no doubt uncover inaccuracies, errors, and numberless oversimplifications.
This story is one truth among others: a knitting together of objective facts and subjective probabilities. Adele and Kurt truly lived on the same street in 1927. That they should have met there seems to me entirely plausible. That Adele seduced Kurt is obvious; that he gave her lessons in logic is much less so. That they shared an apple in bed is poetic license. That she was allowed to care for Kurt and meet with Morgenstern at the sanatorium is a supposition. That she fed him with a spoon is fact. That her mother-in-law was a gorgon is highly probable; that she encouraged Adele to marry her son is much less so. That Adele was pregnant at their wedding is pure invention, but that she rescued her husband on the steps of the university with her doughty umbrella is a true story. That they were cold and afraid on the Trans-Siberian railway seems logical. That Adele would have liked tempura in Japan is only natural, as who doesn’t? That the logician complained about his trunk key being stolen has been reported by good Mrs. Frederick. That Pauli and Einstein were partial to Austrian cooking is a supposition, but the “Pauli effect” is well known in scientific circles; Adele’s soufflé could never have withstood it. That Einstein and Gödel walked daily arm-in-arm is historical fact. That the genius who discovered relativity suffered from excessive perspiration is equally so. All his biographers agree on his appetite for and coarseness toward the female sex, though they are more divided on his interest in the relativistic dishwasher. Those who are familiar with Einstein’s life will easily identify the quotations and aphorisms attributed to him. The naturalization scene has been told by Oskar Morgenstern himself. That his companions derided Gödel on the car ride home is a defensible conjecture. There is little documentation about Adele’s friendships, but sources suggest that Lili Kahler-Loewy was a very appealing person. Her friendship with Albert is incontrovertible. That Adele got angry with her husband is beyond challenge; the provocation was excessive. That Mr. Hulbeck was an odd bird and that he played the tom-tom is on record; that he disparaged Goethe and classical German culture seems consistent with the Dadaist position. Theolonius Jessup, on the other hand, is pure invention. Although. It is a fact that the Oppenheimers were persecuted by Senator McCarthy, and Albert Einstein was under surveillance; that Kurt Gödel would be tailed by the FBI is therefore highly probable. That the Gödels played games of thought transference is a true story. A biographer has related that the reclusive genius was approached by a film director. I chose to believe that it might have been Kubrick. That the young Paul Cohen came to the old master’s house to sip hot water is a narrative device. That the logician’s office door was slammed in his face is historical fact. That Gödel died of hunger is regrettably true; that Adele was unwilling to hand over his archives is a gross distortion. She donated the Nachlass to the Institute for Advanced Study. It occupies approximately nine cubic yards of space. That they loved each other for more than fifty years strikes me as self-evident.
The Goddess of Small Victories Page 37