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.
“Your idol has flown, Kurtele. Maria Cebotari is now singing at the Berlin Opera.”
17
She scratched at the door again; no immediate answer. Adele had responded neither to her contrite letter nor to the expensive gift accompanying it. Anna’s anger had swung from the old woman to herself and back without really finding a target. She should never have trusted her too-sudden intimacy with Adele. She thought back to the maple tree. She had been overconfident; she’d imagined herself becoming indispensable. Unfuckable virgin. The words still stuck in her craw.
“Kommen Sie rein!” Come in!
She entered the lavender-scented room on tiptoe. Mrs. Gödel, freshly powdered and perfumed, had spruced herself up. “Anna, I am happy to see you.” A failure of memory was unlikely; she had apparently decided to act as though nothing had happened. “Dear child, I recognized your timid little knock. Now, as you like to poke your nose into other people’s business, I’ve prepared a few crumbs for you.”
The young woman squared her shoulders; Adele hadn’t forgotten everything. A truce was acceptable. She slid her coat off while Adele opened a translucent envelope with careful gestures. “Where did I put my glasses?” Anna brought them to her docilely. Adele patted the blanket. “Come sit next to me. These are some mementos I set aside before I was moved here.” Anna felt her resentment melt away as she looked at the first photograph: an old-fashioned snapshot of two little boys posing, the younger of whom was Kurt. Rudolf was holding a hoop; Kurt carried a doll. Still a toddler, he wore a shift.
“Here is my kleine Herr Warum, my little Mr. Why.”
“I would love to see a photograph of you as a child.”
“We left Vienna so quickly. When I came back after the war, everything had disappeared.”
“You must have been a very joyful girl!”
The old lady scratched her head under her turban. The edges had already discolored, the delicate blue shifting to a yellowish gray.
“I was the eldest of three Porkert sisters, Liesl, Elizabeth, and Adele — a terrible trio! What a racket we made! My father called me his ‘stubborn little mule.’ ”
Anna held back the comment on the tip of her tongue. She wasn’t sure whether she’d won back the right to be ironic.
“I was born at the wrong time. The girls today have all sorts of opportunities. We were so … imprisoned. Every freedom cost us so much. And also, we had experienced so many wars. We lived in fear of seeing our men go to the front. Even my husband. He had diplomas all over the place, and they still called him fit for service!”
“Did you immigrate to the United States so he wouldn’t be drafted?”
“We were waging battles on many fronts, my sweet.”
Anna went on to another snapshot. The kind word slipped by Adele into her sentence had affected her too strongly. She was not going to forget her humiliation because of a small trace of affection. She chose a tiny print in which Adele stood in a groom’s uniform against the backdrop of a theater curtain. She was holding hands with a man in blackface.
“The only remnant of my brilliant career as a dancer. It was hardly classical ballet. More like pantomime!”
“An era when people of color were not welcome in the theater.”
“The first time I ever saw a black man, I was getting off the boat in San Francisco in 1940. Even in Vienna’s nightclubs, I never met any.”
“Billie Holiday told the story that she was not considered black enough at first to sing jazz. She used to darken her face with makeup. Strange period.”
“Strange fruit. Ach! Billie … America was not all bad. When I arrived here, the music really helped me. Except for bebop, which I couldn’t stomach. What was that man’s name? Charlie Parker! He used to make me dizzy. Students were crazy about him. They compared his noise to Bach, to mathematics. I never saw the connection. In any case, Bach always made me feel depressed.”
“Did you go to nightclubs with your husband?”
“With Kurt! You are surely joking? He hated crowds and noise! No, I listened to singers on the radio. Ella, Sarah … I particularly liked Lady Day. Even if I didn’t understand all the words. Do you remember that song, ‘Easy to Remember but So Hard to Forget’?”
“Old photographs are probably not good for you, Adele.”
“I don’t look at them often. No point, I have it all here.”
Pushed by her finger, her turban came unstuck from the side of her head, and a rancid odor wafted into the room. Anna breathed through her mouth. The smell of Adele’s body mixed with the familiar smell of lavender troubled her. Her birthday present, a bottle of her grandmother’s favorite perfume, had been liberally applied. From her nostalgia, Anna realized it had been a mistake to choose the perfume of a departed loved one as a gift.
“That one, if I remember correctly, is from 1939, a little before we left.”