“You’re beautiful, Adele! You look like Simone de Beauvoir. It goes with your eyes.”
The old lady looked at herself indulgently.
“You called me by my first name. I don’t have a problem with that. But please stop resorting to it according to circumstances. I’m not senile.”
She smoothed the tissue paper and folded it into a perfect square.
“Gladys is bound to tell me that it makes me look old.”
“Since when have you listened to the opinions of others?”
“You think she’s harmless, but she’s a nuisance. She paws through my belongings.”
“I think I’ve gotten the message.”
“Gladys is secretly venomous. Seeing too much of her can kill you in the long run. She went through three husbands.”
“She’s still on the prowl.”
“Some women never have enough.”
She wiped the mirror with her sleeve before giving it back to Anna.
“So, what is the price tag on your generosity? I wasn’t born yesterday, young lady. Presents are always attached to a cost.”
“It has nothing to do with the Nachlass. I’d like to ask you a personal question, if I may. I’ve been wondering … what you talked about with your husband.”
“You’re always so apologetic. It’s exhausting.”
Adele stored the folded paper in her bedside stand. Anna, not knowing what to do with her hands, tucked them between her thighs.
“What do your parents do?”
“They are both history professors.”
“Rivals?”
“Colleagues.”
“So your parents were intellectuals, but when they went for a walk on Sunday, I’m sure they held hands.”
“They talked to each other a lot.”
She listened calmly to her lie. Had she been honest, Anna would have replaced “talked to” with “shouted at.” They competed over everything, even their child. The lectures of one answered an argument by the other, when they weren’t fighting outright. They waited for their daughter to enter the university before signing a tacit truce. Each had staked out a separate territory, large enough to provide a field for her greatness and his. She, Rachel, went to Berkeley and the West Coast, while George, closer to home, scaled Harvard’s walls. Anna stayed on in Princeton, alone in a town she had always wanted to leave.
“How did they meet?”
“They were students.”
“Does it shock you that a woman like me ended up with a great mind like him?”
“I see great minds all around me, and I’m not impressed by them. But your husband is a legend, even among the great and the good. He was known to be unusually hermetic.”
“We were a couple. Don’t go digging beyond that.”
“And you talked about his work at the dinner table? Today I proved the possibility of space-time travel, would you pass the salt, darling?”
“Was that how it was at your house?”
“I didn’t have meals with my parents.”
“I see. A middle-class upbringing?”
“Prophylaxy.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I had an old-fashioned upbringing.”
Anna’s childhood was continually beset with domestic chaos, carefully kept behind padded doors. Dinners alone with the governess, private schools, dance and music lessons, smocked dresses, and a general inspection before being trotted out into company. Returning from parties where her mother had flitted around the room and her father had pontificated in a corner, she would curl up in the backseat of the car pretending to be asleep to avoid being asphyxiated by their conversation.
The young woman smiled bitterly, and Adele chose to examine her fingers.
Apparently satisfied, Adele said, “To be perfectly frank, at the start of our relation, I harassed him. I couldn’t stand to be left out. I had no access to the greater part of his life. But I had to learn my place. It wasn’t why I was there. It really was beyond me, even if I didn’t want to admit it! And … we had other worries.”
Anna poured the old woman a glass of water for her dry mouth. Adele took it with a hesitant hand. She tried unsuccessfully to keep it from trembling.
“Kurt was searching for perfection and opposed to any idea of vulgarization. It implies a kind of compromise and inexactitude. What I know about his work I gleaned from others. I listened a great deal.”
“When did you realize how important he was?”
“Right away. He was a small star at the university.”
“Were you present at the birth of the incompleteness theorem?”
“Why? Are you planning to write a book?”
“I’d like to hear your version. The theorem became a kind of legend to a group of initiates.”
“It always made me laugh, all these people talking about that fucking theorem. The truth is, I would be surprised if even half of them understood it. And then there are the people who use it to demonstrate anything and everything! I know the limits to my understanding. And they are not due to laziness.”
“Don’t your limits make you angry?”
“Why fight something you can’t do anything about?”
“It doesn’t sound like you.”
“You think you know me already?”
“There’s more to you than you let on. But why me? Why do you let me come back and visit?”
“You didn’t hesitate to strike back at me. I hate condescension. And I like your mix of apologeticness and insolence. I’d like to find out what you’re hiding under that first-communion skirt of yours.”
Deftly, she tucked a stray lock of hair under her turban.
“Do you know what Albert used to say? Yes, Einstein was one of our friends. A conversation stopper, isn’t it? Ach! How he bored us with saying it!”
Anna leaned in so as not to miss a word.
“ ‘The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious.’ Of course, it can be understood as relating to faith. I read it differently. I’ve brushed up against mystery. Telling you the facts will never transmit the experience.”
“Tell it to me as a good story. I won’t write a report when I get back to the office. It has nothing to do with them. Just you and me, and a cup of tea.”
“I’d prefer a little bourbon.”
“It’s still daylight out.”
“Then a sip of sherry.”
8. AUGUST 1930: The Incompleteness Café
I have refrained from making truth an idol, preferring to leave it to its more modest name of exactitude.
— Marguerite Yourcenar, The Abyss
On my nights off, I waited for him outside the Café Reichsrat across from the university. It wasn’t my sort of café, being more for talking than drinking. The talk was always of rebuilding the world, a project I saw no need for. On that night the meeting was to focus on preparations for a study trip to Königsberg. I was perfectly happy not to be going, as a conference on the “epistemology of the exact sciences” was no sort of tryst. The days before the meeting, Kurt hummed with a particular, keen vibration. He was enthusiastic, a new state for him. He was in a hurry to present his work.
I was cooling my heels under the arcades when he finally emerged from the café, long after most of the others had left. I was thirsty, hungry, and planning to make a scene, just on principle. From the way his shoulders were hunched, I knew it was the wrong moment.
“Do you want to go out to dinner?”
“We don’t have to.”
He buttoned his jacket carefully. It no longer had the impeccable drape of the previous summer. It seemed to belong to another, stouter man.
“Let’s walk for a bit, if you don’t mind.”
For him “walking” meant cloaking himself in silence. After a few minutes, I couldn’t bear it any longer. What can you do except talk, to solace a man who refuses to eat or to touch you? I knew of no better remedy for anxiety.