“Don’t be ridiculous, Adele! I’m in my own university.”
We had barely reached the door when the first ruffian hailed us: “Hey, Jewboy! Taking blondie for a walk?”
Kurt squeezed my arm until it hurt. I’d never seen him confronted by direct aggression.
“Sir, you’re speaking out of turn.”
I rolled my eyes. What world did he live in? It was pointless, not to say stupid, to respond to this kind of provocation.
The first goon flicked my husband’s hat off with his fingers. He was all of twenty years old and had a baby’s skin that must still have been his mother’s joy.
“Show a little respect, hey?”
My stomach knotted. I felt the group around us grow tighter.
“Not such a big shot when we step away from the blackboard, are we?”
“I don’t remember seeing you at any of my courses.”
The boy turned to his companions, reprising a scene they had acted out dozens of times.
“This guy hasn’t caught on. He thinks I might actually sit there for a course in Jewish science.”
At this point, the men I had previously known would have waded in with their fists despite the imbalance in numbers, but Kurt had the wild, staring eyes of a person strangled for air.
“He’s not Jewish, leave him alone!”
“Cat got his tongue? As well as his dick?”
He pinched me at the waist.
“Like to try a real man for once? What say, cutie?”
I pushed him away and grabbed my husband’s lifeless hand.
“We’re leaving, Kurt. Right now!”
A brown hedge formed in front of us.
“Not so fast, doll face! Big boy’s staying with us. We want to explain a few things to him.”
I’d fended off nightclub drunks for years. I wasn’t going to let these hoodlums intimidate me, whatever the color of their shirts. Sometimes all you have to do is show your teeth to make the pup creep back into his kennel.
“Get out of the way! You don’t scare me! You aren’t even fit to shine his shoes!”
Kurt tried to deflect the slap aimed at me. His glasses fell off, and he dropped to all fours looking for them, while the brownshirts sniggered. I realized they were going to start pummeling him, and I saw red. Acting on reflex, I lashed out with my umbrella, giving a few startled heads a passing thump. In the next instant I lifted Kurt to his feet and recovered his glasses. With our attackers momentarily stunned, we galloped down the stairs, not looking back to see if they were following. The rain sheeted down on us as I led Kurt quickly to the Café Landtmann, where we finally rested, out of breath, choosing the table farthest from the windows.
My senses registered every detail of the scene with crystal clarity: the smells of dampness and roasting coffee, the sound of tableware clinking, the pattering of the rain, the laughter of the kitchen workers. Kurt, soaked clear through, seemed spent. He fingered the cracked lenses of his eyeglasses with a nervous gesture that boded poorly.
The battle wasn’t over for me. I’d extricated him from a brawl untouched, now I had to rub out the psychic damage. The episode couldn’t have failed to remind him of the assassination of his friend Moritz Schlick on those same stairs. I was much more frightened at the prospect of seeing him crack than at having to confront the Reich’s whole army with an umbrella.
I’d never counted on him to protect me. Making a show of his virility wasn’t among his concerns. He had never fought anything except the limits of his own thought. Until now he had even steered clear of any infighting over intellectual priority. The danger we’d just faced had brought home to him the full absurdity of the new order. He was unprepared to deal with outright stupidity. Nothing would come of subdued displays, it was time to bark like a dog. It wasn’t his moment. I needed to transform the incident into an anecdote where I came off as a doughty matron — anything but a heroine. We often spoke of the episode afterward. He would always praise my courage, knowing that he was also diminishing his own and casting himself forever in the role of castrated male. I couldn’t tell whether he was unfazed at looking like a weakling or preferred to hide his shame behind denial. For my part, I hadn’t been courageous, just acting on my survival instinct.
“They took me for a Jew. I don’t understand.”
“There’s nothing to understand. Those thugs were looking for a fight, they latched on to you the way they would have done to anyone else. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“The university is sending me a warning. They’re trying to frighten me.”
“That’s a total hallucination, and I won’t have you thinking like that! There is no plot against you! The Nazis put all intellectuals into the same basket. That’s all.”
He was shivering. I took his hands and made him keep them on the table.
“I can’t return to the university. They’ll be waiting for me.”
“It’s no use going back until you have your accreditation.”
“What is going to happen to me, Adele?”
I would have liked to hear him use the word “us.” Or to be asking the question myself and to be governed by his answer.
The waiter brought our order. I downed my cognac in one go and signaled for another. Kurt hadn’t touched his own. I decided that the moment had come for shock treatment.
“We need money. Now!”
“My mother is in desperate straits. My brother is already doing everything he possibly can. We’ll be able to use the draft from Princeton once the Foreign Exchange Service makes the funds available.”
“I’m talking about us, right now! You have to find work, Kurt. You have connections, put them to good use! You know people in manufacturing. I’m ready to go back to serving beer, but you need to do something too!”
“Work as an engineer? You’re crazy!”
“This is no moment to act the prima donna. We need a way out. You’re going to have to work!”
He choked on his brandy. Accepting a position outside the bosom of his alma mater had always struck him as laughable. Now that he was up against it, the prospect suffocated him.
“Then you need to accept the conditions laid down by the university.”
“I won’t kowtow to the Nazis.”
“Only temporarily, Kurt. Write to Veblen and Flexner right away! Ask them to get us a double visa.”
“I’ve already spoken to von Neumann about it. My Austrian papers are no longer valid, and the American immigration quota for Germans has already been met. They’re not accepting anyone else.”
“You’re not just anyone.”
I swigged my second cognac. An enormous task still lay ahead of me.
“Kurt, we have to leave Vienna.”
“You told me you never wanted to leave here.”
“There’s nothing to keep us any longer.”
“My mother has been trying to warn me of the danger for years. She understood before anyone else. It’s not surprising that she’s in so much trouble with the authorities in Brno.”
“It didn’t keep her from staying on.”
I could read his mind: If we had only listened to her last year, Adele, we wouldn’t be in our present fix. He had never thought seriously about emigrating, but it still provided a handy weapon in our little domestic war. The previous winter, I’d had a miscarriage before I could even tell him I was pregnant. He’d gone back to Princeton alone just two weeks after our wedding and returned in June. But making my confession at this stage would only earn me his retroactive reproaches. Anna, ever the optimist, had advised me not to let him go to the United States without telling him. She thought fatherhood might give him new strength. I decided not to try the experiment. In the end, my lie cost me only a bit of added loneliness and a few regrets.
I hadn’t seen Anna for months, or “Anna Sarah,” since all Jewish women in the Reich were forced after August 17, 1938, to add “Sarah” to their first name in official documents. She was hiding in the countryside at the home of her son’s wet nurse. Wagner-Jauregg hadn’t looked out for her after all.