“Argumentum ad hominem. Your logic is inappropriate and your ethics unjust. If I used such low arguments, I would be thought a terrible lout.”
“Why don’t you put a little more coal on the fire.”
Kurt cast a suspicious glance at the coal-burning stove. It was a chore he hated. He opened the window wide.
“What are you doing? It’s cold enough to split rocks!”
“I’m hot. The air in this room is stuffy.”
“If I die of pneumonia, it’ll be your fault. Come here!”
He put down his shirt and lay next to me. We hid under the covers. He caressed my cheek.
“I like your birthmark.”
I caught his hand. “You’re the only one who does.”
Using two fingers, he traced a horizontal eight between my breasts.
“I read an interesting story about port-wine stains.”
I bit him gently.
“According to Chinese legend, birthmarks are passed down from previous lives. Therefore I must have made a mark on you in an earlier life so I’d be able to find you again in this one.”
“In other words, because I put up with you in a past life I’m doomed to put up with you in all subsequent ones?”
“That’s the conclusion I’ve come to.”
“And how will I recognize you?”
“I’ll always keep the windows open, even in winter.”
“Too many windows to inspect, it would be more sensible for me to leave a mark on you too.”
I bit him, not holding back this time. He howled.
“Pain is something we never forget, Kurtele.”
“Adele, you’re crazy!”
“Which one of us is crazier? Look how you disfigured me! I hope it was in my very last life! Because I don’t like the idea of having wandered around like this since the dawn of time.”
My hands won me forgiveness for the bite I’d given. I felt his body relax.
“Are you asleep?”
“I’m thinking. I have to go to work.”
“Already?”
“I have a present for you.”
Reaching under the bed for his document case, he produced two red, highly polished apples. With a knife, he had carved “220” on one and “284” on the other.
“Is it the number of our past lives? One of us has got a head start on the other.”
“I’ll eat ‘220,’ and you ‘284.’ ”
“You always choose the lighter one.”
“Hush, Adele. It’s an Arab custom. Both 220 and 284 are amicable numbers, magnificent numbers. Each is the sum of the factors of the other. The factors of 284 are 1, 2, 4, 71, and 142. Their sum is 220. And the factors of—”
“Enough, it’s all too romantic, darling toad, I’ll faint!”
“Only 42 pairs below 10,000,000 are known.”
“Stop, I’m begging you!”
“If an infinite number of them exist, no one has ever proved it. And a pair with an even and an uneven number has never been found.”
I stuffed the apple into his mouth. As I bit into mine, I was already nostalgic for this moment, for what we would never be again: beautiful, stupid children, alien to everything except each other. It was the most precious gift he ever gave me. I kept the seeds in a candy box from Café Demel.
The first time we’d embraced, a few months earlier, I’d been afraid that I would break him in two. After the massive, brushy torso of my first husband, I was unused to his brittle, hairless body. I didn’t initiate him into sexual matters, but I had to teach him about intimacy. At the start of our relations, sex was a release for him, a concession to biology. A detail to be addressed lest his mental acuity suffer.
Of course, I didn’t belong to his world. But intellectuals are men, after all, their desires are not in a separate compartment. On the contrary, Kurt and his friends were fierce in their desires, as though needing to take revenge. Their common hunger for the ideal could be assuaged only through the flesh. We girls were a reality they could palp.
He’d lost his virginity fairly young to an attractive older woman, a friend of the family. His mother, when the affair came to light, embarked on an intensive campaign to safeguard the family honor. Capital not to be frittered away on a girl without expectations. Marianne envisioned her son marrying a woman of a certain social standing — a comfortable union to cushion her precious offspring’s daily life. His wife would have a good education but no personal ambition, the necessary and sufficient basis for perpetuating — or, rather, providing roots for — this dynasty of petit bourgeois that had accumulated money through the ceaseless striving of Gödel senior. Kurt was forced to break off his liaison and took care afterward to hide his private life, developing a taste for secrecy. Several years after our meeting at the Nachtfalter, his mother would learn of our relations and view them as an unfair punishment for a blameless life. Marianne never forgave me for Kurt’s duplicity, not recognizing, of course, that I had been its first victim.
In the winter of 1929, Frau Gödel was still happily unaware of my existence. Her husband having died, she had just moved to Vienna to be near her two sons. Kurt had to jump through hoops to find time for both his suspicious mother and his demanding mistress, while still keeping up with his course work at the university. Although a man who didn’t like to eat, he would have dinner at my house, then join his family for a late second dinner after the theater. He spent part of the night in our bed, ran off to his office at dawn, and then would suffer through long digestive walks in the Prater on his mother’s arm. How did he manage to survive? A rock would have cracked under the pressure. Yet he said himself that he had never worked as well. I didn’t understand that he was using himself up.
After wolfing down his “220,” Kurt jumped out of bed. He brushed his suit, polished his shoes, and checked every button on his clothing. The first time, before he’d explained to me the logic of his dressing-room choreography, I’d laughed. “Shirt buttons, always from the bottom up to avoid misalignment.” He put his left leg into his trousers first because he balanced better on his right and found it lessened the time he was unstable. It was the same for every moment of his life.
He slipped on his mussed shirt without grumbling. So it was true, he was going off to work. He would never appear in his mother’s drawing room looking slovenly. He had accounts with the best tailors in Vienna, he was that elegant. Marianne had little taste for the bohemian chic some students affected. She thought of her sons as display mannequins to advertise the Gödels’ success. After all, textiles were in the family history. Her husband had risen from being foreman in a clothing factory to directing its operations. I tended to be a bit approximate. Despite all my pains, something in my outfit always fell short: a laddered stocking, an ill-fashioned cuff, an off-color pair of gloves. But my fresh-out-of-bed look was exciting enough to Kurt that he spared me his mania. For Kurt, everything assumed extreme proportions, but he applied his sartorial terrorism only to himself. What I had first thought was snobbishness or a bourgeois holdover was a necessity of survival. Kurt wore his suits to face the world. Without them, he had no body. He put back on the paraphernalia of a human being every morning, and it had to be impeccable since it advertised his normality. I later understood that he had so little faith in his mental balance that he laid a grid of ordinariness over his life: a normal outfit, a normal house, a normal life. And I was an ordinary woman.
7
“But it isn’t my birthday.” Adele hesitated to take off her cap. She didn’t want to expose her thinly thatched skull. Anna knelt down, pretending to search her bag for a mirror that she had already found. When she rose to her feet, Mrs. Gödel was wearing her present: a soft blue-gray turban.