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Authors: Yannick Grannec
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acquaintance was too slight for me to be dishonest with her. After every meeting with Kurt I would run and hide behind the building to cry, bemoaning my fate and my inability to help. He was so thin, so weak. Anna would roll cigarettes for me and wipe my mascara-streaked cheeks without comment. Only once did she give me advice: “If their drugs really worked, we’d know it. It’s not a secret. What your man truly needs is love. You’re going to have to reach down and deliver, sweetie.”
I visited every day, waiting for hours by the service entrance to spend a few minutes alone with Kurt. The Gödels knew about our furtive meetings, as my man had no talent for deception, but they’d been unable to derail what they took for little more than a passing fancy, which was to be swept away, along with the whole sorry business, by denial.
When Kurt recovered a semblance of health, his mother sent him to a spa across the border in Yugoslavia for a rest cure. I fretted in Vienna all summer. Kurt came back in excellent form and newly confident in his future: he had been recruited by Oswald Veblen, the mathematician, to give a series of lectures at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study.
The IAS had been founded four years earlier by a wealthy philanthropist, Louis Bamberger, and his sister. They had sold their chain of department stores to Macy’s a few days before thestock market crash of 1929 and used the proceeds to start a foundation dedicated to pure research. The times were ripe for poaching from European universities—the intelligentsia were climbing all over each other to get out the door and reach America safely. A newly minted doctor of sciences in Vienna was entitled to only the unpaid position of
Privatdozent
. Kurt refused to consider working in the private sector as an engineer; the idea made him laugh—when it didn’t make him sick. Aside from recognition, the invitation from the United States offered him a path to a brilliant academic career and true financial independence. Its cost would be our separation.
Princeton was an opportunity not to be missed. It was a world tailored to his measure and one where they spoke his language. He was so excited at the prospect of going! I had my doubts, I’ll admit. Crossing the Atlantic was a long and exhausting trip, even for a passenger on the upper decks. How was he to survive this exile when a trifle could send him spiraling into anxiety? How was he to negotiate this unfamiliar country and its people? How would he stand the uncertainty, when what he dreaded most was a break in his routine?
He had promised to return. He had asked me not to cry. To wait. What else had I done all these years? Telegrams were expensive, and letters traveled by boat. Waiting was all I had left. Yet we had already survived a far greater separation, the distance between a genius and a dancer.
I finished my shift a little before midnight. I ushered the last of the drinkers out into the street and lowered the blinds, hung my dirndl on a hanger, and retouched my face powder in the light of the bar. Too old to dance, not old enough to give up the life. If you had told me five years earlier that I would one day be serving beer in a traditional costume, I’d have mocked you for a falseprophet and lifted my skirts in your face. But times had changed, and I’d given up my room and my independence. My father now escorted me home from work: the streets had grown that dangerous. A rotting Vienna was loosing its nighttime farts, erupting in public brawls and political violence whose sense escaped me. The political strife had just come to a head in Germany and would soon arrive in Austria. Some had already chosen their camp. Lieesa was drawn to the Heimwehr’s Catholic militias, which, given her lightskirt past, was slightly ironic. Other carousing friends of mine gave up nightlife for politics and joined the Socialist Schutzbund militia. All were puppets. None of the successive coalition
I visited every day, waiting for hours by the service entrance to spend a few minutes alone with Kurt. The Gödels knew about our furtive meetings, as my man had no talent for deception, but they’d been unable to derail what they took for little more than a passing fancy, which was to be swept away, along with the whole sorry business, by denial.
When Kurt recovered a semblance of health, his mother sent him to a spa across the border in Yugoslavia for a rest cure. I fretted in Vienna all summer. Kurt came back in excellent form and newly confident in his future: he had been recruited by Oswald Veblen, the mathematician, to give a series of lectures at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study.
The IAS had been founded four years earlier by a wealthy philanthropist, Louis Bamberger, and his sister. They had sold their chain of department stores to Macy’s a few days before thestock market crash of 1929 and used the proceeds to start a foundation dedicated to pure research. The times were ripe for poaching from European universities—the intelligentsia were climbing all over each other to get out the door and reach America safely. A newly minted doctor of sciences in Vienna was entitled to only the unpaid position of
Privatdozent
. Kurt refused to consider working in the private sector as an engineer; the idea made him laugh—when it didn’t make him sick. Aside from recognition, the invitation from the United States offered him a path to a brilliant academic career and true financial independence. Its cost would be our separation.
Princeton was an opportunity not to be missed. It was a world tailored to his measure and one where they spoke his language. He was so excited at the prospect of going! I had my doubts, I’ll admit. Crossing the Atlantic was a long and exhausting trip, even for a passenger on the upper decks. How was he to survive this exile when a trifle could send him spiraling into anxiety? How was he to negotiate this unfamiliar country and its people? How would he stand the uncertainty, when what he dreaded most was a break in his routine?
He had promised to return. He had asked me not to cry. To wait. What else had I done all these years? Telegrams were expensive, and letters traveled by boat. Waiting was all I had left. Yet we had already survived a far greater separation, the distance between a genius and a dancer.
I finished my shift a little before midnight. I ushered the last of the drinkers out into the street and lowered the blinds, hung my dirndl on a hanger, and retouched my face powder in the light of the bar. Too old to dance, not old enough to give up the life. If you had told me five years earlier that I would one day be serving beer in a traditional costume, I’d have mocked you for a falseprophet and lifted my skirts in your face. But times had changed, and I’d given up my room and my independence. My father now escorted me home from work: the streets had grown that dangerous. A rotting Vienna was loosing its nighttime farts, erupting in public brawls and political violence whose sense escaped me. The political strife had just come to a head in Germany and would soon arrive in Austria. Some had already chosen their camp. Lieesa was drawn to the Heimwehr’s Catholic militias, which, given her lightskirt past, was slightly ironic. Other carousing friends of mine gave up nightlife for politics and joined the Socialist Schutzbund militia. All were puppets. None of the successive coalition
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