'So that's when you gave up?' I asked softly.
He nodded. 'Yes.'
'And you never again worked on Goldbach's Conjecture?'
'Never.'
'What about Isolde?'
My question seemed to startle him. 'Isolde? What about her?'
'I thought that it was to win her love you decided to prove the Conjecture – no?'
Uncle Petros smiled sadly.
'Isolde gave me "the beautiful journey", as our poet says. Without her I might "never have set out". [13] Yet, she was no more than the original stimulus. A few years after I had begun my work on the Conjecture her memory faded, she became no more than a phantasm, a bittersweet recollection… My ambitions became of a higher, more exalted variety.'
He sighed. 'Poor Isolde! She was killed during the Allied bombardment of Dresden, along with her two daughters. Her husband, the "dashing young lieutenant" for whom she'd abandoned me, had died earlier on the Eastern Front.'
The last part of my uncle's story had no particular mathematical interest:
In the years that followed history, not mathematics, became the determining force in his life. World events broke down the protective barrier which till then had kept him safe within the ivory tower of his research. In 1938, the Gestapo arrested his housekeeper and sent her to what was still in those days referred to as a 'work camp'. He didn't hire anybody to take her place, naively believing that she'd return soon, her arrest due to some 'misunderstanding'. (After the war's end he learned from a surviving relative that she'd died in 1943 in Dachau, just a short distance from Munich.) He started to eat out, returning home only to sleep. When he was not at the university he would hang out at the chess club, playing, watching or analysing games.
In 1939, the Director of the School of Mathematics, by then a prominent member of the Nazi party, indicated that Petros should immediately apply for German citizenship and formally become a subject of the Third Reich. He refused, not for any reasons of principle (Petros managed to go through life unhampered by any ideological burden) but because the last thing he wanted was to be involved once again with differential equations. Apparently, it was the Ministry of Defence that had suggested he apply for citizenship, with precisely this aim in mind. After his refusal he became in essence a persona non grata. In September 1940, a little before Italy's declaration of war on Greece would have made him an enemy alien subject to internment, he was fired from his post. After a friendly warning, he left Germany.
Having, by the strict criterion of published work, been mathematically inactive for more than twenty years, Petros was now academically unemployable and so he had to return to his homeland. During the first years of the country's occupation by the Axis powers he lived in the family house in central Athens, on Queen Sophia Avenue, with his recently widowed father and his newly-wed brother Anargyros (my parents had moved to their own house), devoting practically all his time to chess. Very soon, however, my newborn cousins with their cries and toddler activities became a much greater annoyance to him than the occupying Fascists and Nazis and he moved to the small, rarely used family cottage in Ekali.
After the Liberation, my grandfather managed to secure for Petros the offer of the Chair of Analysis at Athens University, through string-pulling and manoeuvring. He turned it down, however, using the spurious excuse that 'it would interfere with his research'. (In this instance, my friend Sammy's theory of Goldbach's Conjecture as my uncle's pretext for idleness proved completely correct.) Two years later, paterfamilias Papachristos died, leaving to his three sons equal shares of his business and the principal executive positions exclusively to my father and Anargyros. 'My eldest, Petros,’ his will expressly decreed, 'shall retain the privilege of pursuing his important mathematical research,’ i.e. the privilege of being supported by his brothers without doing any work.
'And after that?' I asked, still cherishing the hope that a surprise might be in store, an unexpected reversal on the last page.
'After that nothing,’ my uncle concluded. ‘For almost twenty years my life has been as you know it: chess and gardening, gardening and chess. Oh, and once a month a visit to the philanthropic Institution founded by your grandfather, to help them with the book-keeping. It's something towards the salvation of my soul, just in case there exists a hereafter.'
It was midnight by this time and I was exhausted. Still, I thought I should end the evening on a positive note and, after a big yawn and a stretch, I said: 'You are admirable, Uncle… if not for anything eise, for the courage and magnanimity with which you accepted failure.'
This comment, however, got a reaction of utter surprise. 'What are you talking about?' my uncle said. 'I didn't fail!'
Now the surprise was mine. 'You didn't?'
'Oh no, no, no, dear boy!' He shook his head from side to side. 'I see you didn't understand anything. I didn't fail – I was just unlucky!'
'Unlucky? You mean unlucky to have chosen such a difficult problem?'
'No,’ he said, now looking totally amazed at my inability to grasp an obvious point. 'Unlucky – that, by the way, is a mild word for it – to have chosen a problem that had no solution. Weren't you listening?' He sighed heavily. 'By and by, my suspicions were confirmed: Goldbach's Conjecture is unprovable!'
'But how can you be so sure about it?' I asked.
'Intuition,’ he answered with a shrug. 'It is the only tool left to the mathematidan in the absence of proof. For a truth to be so fundamental, so simple to state, and yet so unimaginably resistant to any form of systematic reasoning, there could have been no other explanation. Unbeknown to me I had undertaken a Sisyphean task.'
I frowned. 'I don't know about that,’ I said. 'But the way I see it -'
Now, however, Uncle Petros interrupted me with a laugh. 'You may be a bright boy,’ he said, but mathematically you are still no more than a foetus – whereas I, in my time, was a veritable, full-blown giant. So, don't go weighing your intuition against mine, most favoured of nephews!' Against that, of course, I couldn't argue.
Three
My first reaction to this extensive autobiographical account was one of admiration. Uncle Petros had given me the facts of his life with remarkable honesty. It wasn't until a few days later, when the oppressive influence of his melancholy narrative diminished, that I realized everything he'd told me had been beside the point.
Remember that our meeting had been initially arranged so that he could try to justify himself. His life's story was only relevant to the extent that it explained his atrocious behaviour, assigning me in all my adolescent mathematical innocence the task of proving Goldbach's Conjecture. Yet, during his long narrative he had not even touched on his cruel prank. He'd ranted on and on about his own failure (or maybe I should do him the favour of calling it 'bad luck'), but about his decision to turn me away from studying mathematics and the method he had chosen to implement it, not a single word. Did he expect me automatically to draw the conclusion that his behaviour to me was determined by his own bitter life-experiences? It didn't follow: although his life story was indeed a valid cautionary tale, it taught a future mathematician what pitfalls to avoid so as to make the most of his career – not how to terminate it.
I let a few days go by before I went back to Ekali and asked him point-blank: could he now explain why he had attempted to dissuade me from following my inclination.