CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“Nein, nein,” Gödel said, impatiently wiping a string of figures off the blackboard with the sleeve of his tweed jacket. “How did you ever pass the polytechnic exam?”
“Easy,” Einstein replied from his easy chair. “I took it twice.”
“Ach.” Gödel quickly scrawled a new sequence of numbers and mathematical symbols on the cleared corner of the blackboard. “I’m surprised that was all.”
The rest of the board was still cluttered with complex field equations that Einstein had been working on for weeks. He knew that his calculations sometimes needed review by some fresh eye, but it was difficult to find anyone up to the task. Gödel, thank God, was perhaps the premier mathematician in the world — purer, in a way, than even the brilliant John von Neumann — and it was why Einstein had lobbied so hard for him to be allowed into America, and to join him in Princeton. Still, if Oppenheimer knew that even Gödel had been privy to some of this work, he’d throw a fit. It was all as highly classified as any information could be.
While Gödel silently assessed his own corrections, Einstein went to the window, streaked with rain, and peered out at his rear garden. Night had fallen hours ago and a lonely light in the alley revealed a swarm of brown leaves swirling against the doors of the old garage; as neither Einstein nor Helen Dukas could drive and relied upon friends to take them anywhere a bus didn’t go, the garage was used instead to store boxes of his unsorted papers from the Berlin Institute.
“So, what do you think now?” Gödel said, standing back. “Does this not resolve the difficulty you were in?”
Einstein studied the blackboard, squinting in the inadequate light from the torchiere by the door.
“Yes, that’s better. Thank you, Kurt. I should have seen that myself.”
Although Einstein had long prided himself on his thought experiments — his ability to imagine fantastic scenarios and, by doing so, arrive at remarkable conclusions — it was in the more mundane areas of mathematics that he sometimes tripped over his own feet. Once he had achieved some illuminating insight, he was not so interested in explaining the thousand steps by which he had come to it. He wasn’t even sure he knew. His mind was already extrapolating from the new concept — which he accepted intuitively to be right — and racing onward.
From downstairs, he could smell spaghetti sauce simmering in the pot, and hear the chatter of Helen talking to Adele Gödel as they prepared the meal and set the table. He glanced at the clock; it was nearly nine. No wonder he was hungry. As if on cue, Adele called from below, “Enough, you two. This is not Berlin — in America we eat at a decent hour.”
Gödel, still focused on the blackboard, didn’t move, and Einstein had to get up and put a hand on his narrow shoulder to get his attention. Even a gesture that small, and coming from his closest friend in the world, made the man flinch.
“We can finish later,” Einstein said gently. “Let’s have some dinner.”
He shepherded Gödel down the creaking steps and into the dining room, where the anxious Austrian sat down in his chair like a man about to undergo a Gestapo interrogation. His wife made a show of helping Helen to bring in the bowls of pasta and sauce, and then ladling them herself onto Kurt’s plate. He watched her like a hawk, and Einstein exchanged a quick and subtle glance with Helen, who, equally familiar with the couple’s strange protocols, pointedly paid no attention while lifting the lid off a tureen of steamed asparagus.
Even so, Gödel waited until he had seen Adele dig into her own dinner before he cautiously lifted his fork.
“Eat, mein strammer bursche,” she said, using her pet name for him. Strapping lad, it meant, and it always brought a tiny smile to his thin lips. “I made this sauce myself, from the tomatoes from our garden.”
Adele, who wore her hair in curly gold-and-red ringlets, was as natural and outgoing as her husband was reserved. But she doted on her husband, and fiercely protected him from as many of the vicissitudes of life as possible. Back in Vienna in 1937, she had even fought off some teenage Brownshirts who, mistaking Kurt for a Jew, had attacked the couple on their way home from the Nachtfalter, the popular club where she performed. She had kicked and beaten them with her furled umbrella until they ran for cover. Kurt had been traumatized for months.
“You two boys work too hard,” Adele said, putting some asparagus on her husband’s plate, and then cutting the stalks into shorter segments. “I am going to get you some marbles to play with,” she said with a laugh that made her earrings jangle.
“Ah, Kurt will win every time,” Einstein said. “He is the sportsman, not me.”
Gödel, inspecting a bit of the asparagus, beamed; he enjoyed this kind of banter, as it made him feel included without his having to make jokes himself. And he plainly knew it was all in good fun.
Einstein nursed a paternal feeling toward his younger colleague, in part because he had a son of his own, Eduard, who suffered from mental illness. Like Gödel, Eduard had immense talents — he was a technically accomplished musician and a fine writer — but his abilities were so entangled in a skein of neuroses and phobias, fears and delusions, that he could not function outside the confines of the Swiss facility where he lived. It was the greatest sorrow of Einstein’s life that he could not help his son, and it made watching over Kurt seem like a kind of penance.
“Kurt has been trying to convince me — again — that there are psychic elementals that are as real as any physical properties,” Einstein said, as he could not share what they had actually been doing. “If we’re not careful, he will be able to use his mental energy to levitate this table.”
Adele planted her elbows on the cloth. “He’d better not try. Helen has put out her best china.”
Helen smiled, and Gödel, dabbing at his lips with the linen napkin, launched into another of his ontological proofs. Even as far back as his days in the Vienna Circle, he had rejected the positivism of Bertrand Russell and his cohorts for taking much too dim a view of intuition. Gödel freely admitted that the intuition of a concept was not proof; he argued that it was the opposite. “We do not analyze intuition to see a proof, but by intuition we see something without a proof.” Recently, however, he’d gone beyond that conclusion, too, and asserted that there must then logically be a realm unknowable to our simple senses, where ultimate truth resided. Although Einstein found such mystical speculation unpersuasive, its proponent was not so easy to dismiss out of hand. After all, whose portrait did he himself have hanging on a nail in his study upstairs? Isaac Newton, who had devoted countless hours to the lunatic aims of alchemy.
“If the world is rationally constructed and has meaning,” Kurt said, his head down as he carefully lifted a single strand of spaghetti from his plate, “then there must be such a thing as an afterlife. Otherwise, what is the meaning of this one?”
“Oh, Kurt,” Adele said, “why must everything have a meaning? Maybe we are just here to eat spaghetti and talk and laugh and,” she paused, replenishing her glass and raising it to her host, “drink good wine.”
“You said it yourself, Albert,” Kurt persisted.