“At least if you had children, you wouldn’t be here buttering up an old lady to earn bucks.”
“You have much to teach me in many areas of life, but that certainly isn’t one of them!”
“Bist deppert! Idiot! Don’t take that tone with me!”
“Mrs. Gödel, I like you a lot. Please don’t ruin everything.”
“I want to have nothing to do with your so-called affection. It is playacting! Lies!”
“I always take pleasure in seeing you, Adele.”
“You don’t know pleasure. You are a big joyless lump, with those claws for hands. You reach for life with tongs, at a distance. I think you kiss with your mouth closed. Would you even know an orgasm? You probably excuse yourself in bed constantly. In fact, no. You aren’t even frigid. You are simply an unfuckable virgin!”
Unfairness always had a debilitating effect on Anna: it numbed her will. She felt herself turn to stone, the color drain from her face, and she knew that giving vent to her anger in turn would do her a world of good. Adele, suffering from congestion, was turning purple, which had to be bad for her ancient heart.
“Raus! Out! I’ve dealt with my full share of cripples in my lifetime. Raus!”
At the sounds of commotion, a nurse entered the room.
“Ah! That’s all we needed. For this one to come clomping in like a peasant from the fields!”
“Mrs. Gödel, I’m going to give you a sedative now. No more visits for the moment.”
Anna fled, leaving the sweets on the bed.
She rummaged in her bag for a handkerchief. The vending machine in the hallway beckoned. She sniffed, breathed deeply, and found some change: she’d earned a treat. That Gödel woman had a lot of juice for an old bag living on borrowed time. Anna stifled another round of tears. The crazy biddy could be so wounding. You’ve won, you old witch! I won’t come back again! Why should she subject herself to this kind of treatment? She looked down at her trembling hands. “Claws”? Better not to dwell on the ugly things Adele had said. It wasn’t her fault if the authorities had turned down her request for an outing. And she was under no obligation to come and hold Adele’s kidney dish every day. She gobbled down the chocolate bar. Such a waste of time, all those useless visits. “Unfuckable virgin”? She hadn’t been a virgin since her seventeenth birthday. She was entirely average in that regard, she’d taken the plunge on the night of her prom with a boy called John. They’d both had too much to drink, and the experience — though disappointing — had allowed her to put the formality behind her. She remembered with more bitterness the corollary to this decision: her sudden and final break with her childhood friend Leonard Adams, who’d always thought that her virginity was his by right. They’d often talked about it: he would be gentle, and if he worked on his technique with other girls it was only so that she wouldn’t be disappointed. They’d been raised together, and they would grow old together. At fifteen Leo had already mapped out their way of life: his brilliant career, their house, their two children, and a home office where she could write whatever she wanted, because he had no doubt that she would be an artist. She hadn’t wanted to be his soul mate by default. She was more than a basic premise. So she’d chosen the chick magnet in her class to deflower her. Leo was in boarding school, and she had written him a detailed account of her adventure: he’d always favored her with a blow-by-blow account of his own conquests. She didn’t hear from him again for months. He was extremely touchy, and his prodigious memory helped him stockpile imagined slights. He could remind you years later of an innocent remark, analyzed to the last possible implication. He wasn’t about to forgive her for having cheated him of his due. “Joyless lump”? What did the old bat know about it? Had she even touched a man since Pearl Harbor? Others had schooled Anna in the subtleties later. None of the boys who made it past her apparent severity had ever complained of her coldness. On the contrary, Anna had a hard time getting rid of the little warriors, who’d no sooner shot their bolt than they wanted to park their slippers at the foot of her bed.
Once again, she hadn’t seen it coming; she was always being had. Adele Gödel was another of those embittered women just waiting to unleash their bile.
A blob of glittering pink entered her field of vision. She sighed. Gladys would make a fitting coda to this disastrous day.
“So, you had a little argument?”
“News gets around fast.”
“Adele can be mercurial. But at least she doesn’t hold a grudge. You’ll remember next time.”
“Remember what?”
Gladys put her manicured, liver-spotted hands on her hips. Anna thought she looked all too much like an ad for a golden-years Barbie.
“Today was her birthday! She didn’t have any visitors. Except you, briefly. And it’s probably going to be her last. About that, she has no illusions.”
The young woman felt herself flooded with a familiar sensation of guilt. How could she, usually so meticulous, have overlooked the date? She knew what would happen next: in another two minutes, she would start to find excuses for Adele, and a minute after that, she would look for ways to be forgiven.
*As well as meaning “archive,” the German word Nachlass means “discount.”
16. 1936: The Worst Year of My Life
The mathematical life of a mathematician is short. Work rarely improves after the age of twenty-five or thirty. If little has been accomplished by then, little will ever be accomplished.
— Alfred Adler, “Reflections on Mathematics and Creativity”
Rudolf had gone ahead into his brother’s room. I was waiting my turn, sitting next to the mathematician Oskar Morgenstern, a close friend of Kurt’s to whom I’d never previously been introduced. While he couldn’t possibly have believed that I was “a close friend of the family,” he accepted the information blandly. Kurt, with his boundless capacity for suspicion, had told me that I could trust this good and phlegmatic man entirely.
“How is our patient, Miss Porkert? At our last meeting, he seemed so weak.”
“When they weighed him yesterday morning, he had reached one hundred and seventeen pounds. The doctor has set the bar for his release at one hundred and twenty-eight.”
I hardly dared to whisper; the elegance of the sanatorium’s lobby still intimidated me. Anna had told me lots of stories about the prominent Viennese figures who had stayed there. Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schönberg, and Arthur Schnitzler had come for a spell of luxurious rest, along with maharanis and millionaires of every nationality. Before the crash, of course! In 1936, the desperate rich were growing scarce, at Purkersdorf as well as in Vienna’s nightspots.
The austere sophistication of the décor tired my eyes. The architect, a certain Josef Hoffmann, had an unhealthy liking for checkerboard patterns. They appeared in the wall friezes, floor tiles, window frames, doorways, and even the hard-backed chairs in which I bided so much time. The façade, too, continued the rhythmic pattern of the window openings, which were divided into small squares. I have always needed softness and would have found comfort in neither the sanatorium’s Spartan rooms nor its severely geometrical gardens. The place was perfect for Kurt, however: clean, silent, and orderly. And Morgenstern, an elegant man who was reputed to be an illegitimate scion of the German imperial family, seemed perfectly at ease in this too-vertical world.
“You have been a great help to him, Fräulein. Kurt has told me as much. He is not a man to display his emotions.”
Oskar Morgenstern clasped my hands warmly in his, the one time in our interactions when this man actually touched me.