The Goddess of Small Victories Read Free Page B

job to distinguish between personal mementos and cultural heritage.
    The nurse’s aide helped Adele into bed.
    “There, Mrs. Gödel. You get some rest now.”
    Anna got the message: Don’t rile her up, she has a weak heart.
    “Do you imagine that I keep Kurt Gödel’s
Nachlass
in my nightstand, young lady?”
    “Your room seems like a very pleasant one to live in.”
    “It is a place to die, not to live.”
    Anna felt a growing urge to have a good cup of tea.
    “I’m willing to talk to you, but spare me your young woman’s pity!
Verstanden?
” Do you understand?
    “I gave in to curiosity. I was looking at your photos. Nothing terribly bad.”
    She walked toward the portrait of Adele as a young woman. “You were beautiful.”
    “And I’m not now?”
    “I’ll spare you my young woman’s pity.”
    “Touché. I was twenty when my father took that photograph. He was a professional photographer. My parents had a shop in Vienna, across from where my future husband lived.”
    She took back the frame from Anna. “I have no memory of ever having been that person.”
    “I often feel the same thing.”
    “It must be the hairstyle. Fashions change so quickly.”
    “Sometimes people in old photographs seem to belong to a different species.”
    “I live surrounded by a different species. That’s what it’s like to enter what is delicately called ‘old age.’ ”
    Anna gave a show of savoring this aphorism while her mind searched for ways to approach the reason for her visit.
    “I’m pontificating, aren’t I? The old are fond of doing that. The less we are sure about things, the more we blather on about them! It distracts us from our panic.”
    “We pontificate at all ages, and we’re always an old person to someone.”
    When Adele smiled, Anna glimpsed the luminous young lady hidden in the stout, acerbic old woman.
    “With time, your chin starts to get closer to your nose. Age makes you look more doubtful.”
    Anna brought her hand to her face instinctively.
    “You’re still too young to see this happen. How old are you, Miss Roth?”
    “Please call me Anna. I’m twenty-eight.”
    “At your age, I was so much in love. Are you?”
    The young woman didn’t answer. Adele looked at her with new tenderness.
    “Would you like a cup of tea, Anna? They are serving it in the conservatory half an hour from now. You won’t mind a few more old biddies, will you? ‘Conservatory’ is the name they give that horrid indoor porch with all the plastic flowers. As if none of us knows how to tend a plant! But where are you from? You avoided my question the last time. Do you travel to Europe often? Have you been to Vienna? You must take that sweater off. Is beige in fashion now? It doesn’t suit you. Where do you live? Our house was in the north part of Princeton, near Grover Park.”
    Anna removed her cardigan. It was very hot in purgatory. If she had to make a deal, the old lady’s life against her own, she was in for a very long haul.
    Adele was disappointed to learn that her visitor had never been to Vienna, but she was gratified by the present Anna had brought, a bottle of her favorite bourbon.

4
    1928
    The Circle
    “What kind of bird are you, if you can’t fly?”
    “What kind of bird are
you
, if you can’t swim?”
    —Sergei Prokofiev,
Peter and the Wolf
    Vienna brought us together. My city thrummed with such fever! It bubbled with fierce energy. Philosophers dined with dancers, poets with shopkeepers. Artists laughed in the midst of an amazing concentration of scientific geniuses. All these beautiful people talked nonstop in their urgency to rack up pleasures, whether women, vodka, or pure thought. The virus of jazz had contaminated Mozart’s cradle. We conjured the future and purified the past to the rhythms of black music. War widows, arm in arm with gigolos, tossed away their pension money. Veterans back from the trenches walked through doors that previously had been bolted shut. One last dance,