“Why are you all hunched over? It makes you look old. Sit up straight!”
The young woman corrected her posture. All her life she had been hearing, “Anna, don’t slouch!”
“Those chocolates, where did they come from?”
“Oh, how did you guess?”
“A question of logic. Number one, you are a sensible girl, well brought up, you wouldn’t arrive here empty-handed. Number two …”
She gestured toward the door with her chin. Anna turned and saw a tiny wrinkled creature standing quietly in the doorway. Her pink, spangled angora sweater was smeared with chocolate.
“It’s teatime, Adele.”
“I’m coming, Gladys. Since you want to be useful, young lady, start by helping me out of this chromed coffin.”
Anna brought the wheelchair next to the bed, lowered the metal rails, and drew back the sheets. She hesitated to touch the old lady. Pivoting her body, Gödel’s widow set her trembling feet on the floor, then with a smile invited the young woman to help her up. Anna grabbed her under the arms. Once she was seated in the wheelchair, Adele gave a sigh of comfort, and Anna a sigh of relief, surprised at having so easily rediscovered movements she had thought erased from her memory. Her grandmother Josepha trailed the same scent of lavender in her wake. Anna shook off her nostalgia. A lump in her throat was a small price to pay for such a promising first contact.
“Would you really like to give me pleasure, Miss Roth? Then next time bring a bottle of bourbon with you. The only thing we manage to smuggle into this place is sherry. I despise sherry. Besides, I’ve always hated the British.”
“Then I can come back?”
“Mag sein …” Maybe so.
2. 1928: Back When I Was Beautiful
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions
I noticed him long before he ever looked at me. We lived on the same street in Vienna, in the Josefstadt district next to the university — he with his brother, Rudolf, and I with my parents. It was in the early hours of the morning, I was walking back to my house — alone as usual — from the Nachtfalter, “the Moth,” the cabaret where I worked. I’d never been so naïve as to believe in the disinterest of customers who offered to accompany me home after my shift. My legs knew the route by heart, but I couldn’t afford to lower my guard. The city was murky. Horrible rumors circulated about gangs that snatched young women off the street and sold them to the brothels of Berlin-Babylon. So here I was, Adele Porkert, no longer a girl exactly but looking about twenty, slinking along the walls and starting at shadows. “Porkert,” I told myself, “you’ll be out of these damn shoes within five minutes and tucked up in bed within ten.” When I’d almost reached my door, I noticed a figure on the opposite sidewalk, a smallish man wrapped in a heavy coat, wearing a dark fedora and a scarf across his face. His hands were clasped behind his back and he walked slowly, as though taking an after-dinner stroll. I picked up my pace. My stomach knotted into a ball. My gut rarely misled me. No one goes for a walk at five o’clock in the morning. If you’re out at dawn and you’re on the right side of the human comedy, then you’re returning home from a nightclub or you’re on your way to work. Besides, no one would have bundled up like that on such a mild night. I tightened my buttocks and ran the last few yards, gauging my chances of rousing the neighbors by screaming. I had my keys in one hand and a little bag of ground pepper in the other. My friend Lieesa had showed me how I could use these to blind an attacker and lacerate his face. No sooner did I reach my building than I darted inside and slammed the thin wooden door shut behind me. What a scare he’d given me! I watched him from behind the curtain of my bedroom window: he continued to stroll. When I encountered my ghost the next day at the same time, I didn’t hasten my pace. For two weeks I ran into him every morning. Not once did he seem aware of my presence. Apparently he didn’t see anything. I began walking on his side of the street and took care to brush against him when passing. He never even raised his head. The girls at the club had a good laugh at my story of almost using the pepper. Then one day he wasn’t there. I left work a little earlier, a little later, just in case. But he had vanished.
Until one night in the cloakroom at the Nachtfalter when he handed me his heavy coat, a coat much too warm for that time of year. Its owner was a handsome dark-haired man in his early twenties with blue eyes blurred behind the severe black circles of his glasses. I couldn’t help taunting him.
“Good evening, Herr Ghost from the Lange Gasse.”
He looked at me as though I were the Commendatore himself, then turned to the two friends who accompanied him. One of them I recognized as Marcel Natkin, a regular at my father’s store. They sniggered as young men do when they are a little embarrassed, even the best educated. He wasn’t the type to go putting the make on hatcheck girls.
As he didn’t answer and I was busy with a sudden flood of customers, I decided not to press the point. I took the young men’s overcoats and ducked between the coat hangers.
Toward one o’clock, I put on my stage costume, a modest enough affair given how much some girls exposed of themselves at the fashionable clubs. It was a saucy sailor’s outfit: a short-sleeved shirt, white satin shorts, and a flowing navy-blue necktie. And I was of course fully made up. Amazing how much paint I wore in those days! I did my number with the other girls — Lieesa flubbed her dance routine again — then we turned the stage over to the comic singer. I saw the three young men sitting near the stage, all of them getting an eyeful of our exposed legs, my ghost not least among them. I resumed my station at the hatcheck stand. The Nachtfalter was a small club. We all had to do a little of everything — dancing and selling cigarettes between appearances onstage.
When the young man joined me a short while later, it was my friends’ turn to snigger.
“Excuse me, Fräulein, do we know each other?”
“I often pass you on the Lange Gasse.”
I hunted around under the counter to give myself something to do. He waited impassively.
“I live at number 65,” I said, “and you at number 72. But during the day I dress differently.”
I felt an urge to tease him. His muteness was endearing. He seemed harmless.
“What are you doing every night outdoors, other than watching your shoes move?”
“I like to think as I walk, that is … I think better when I’m walking.”
“And what is so terribly fascinating to think about?”
“I’m not entirely convinced …”
“That I’d understand? Dancers have heads too, you know!”
“Truth and undecidability.”
“Let me guess, you’re one of those philosophy students. You’re frittering away your father’s money on studies that will lead to nothing — except someday taking over the family’s hat-making business.”
“You’re almost right, philosophy does interest me. But I’m a student in mathematics. And, in point of fact, my father runs a garment factory.”
He seemed astonished to have spoken so many words. He bent his upper body forward at the waist in a parody of a military bow.
“My name is Kurt Gödel. And you are Fräulein Adele. Am I right?”
“Almost right, but then you can’t know everything!”
“That remains to be seen.”
He fled, walking backward, jostled by an influx of clients.
I saw him again, as I’d hoped, at closing time. His drinking pals must have stirred his blood during the evening.