William Boyd - The New Confessions

“Yes, please,” I said.

“Not for me, Hamish,” said the little man. “I must be going.” He had a strong mid-European accent.

“By the way,” Hamish said, “this is Kurt.” I shook hands with him. “Kurt, this is John — the friend I was telling you about.”

“ My God! My good heavens! John James Todd.” My hand was re-shaken vigorously by Kurt. “I am honored to meet you, Mr. Todd. Truly honored.” He shook hands with delighted incredulity.

He had a high voice. He was very warmly dressed with a thick jersey under his gray suit and had an unwrapped woollen scarf around his neck. His dark hair had dramatic broad streaks of gray and was brushed straight back off his forehead. There was a marked intensity in his gaze: friendly but profoundly curious.

“I never forget that evening in Berlin. Never,” he said. “Nineteen thirty-two. Your film, Die Konfessionen .”

“You saw it?”

“Yes. Three times in one week. Gloria-Palast.… Mr. Todd, I tell you. The most extraordinary film. A work of genius.”

“Thank you very much.”

He tied his scarf and took a tweed overcoat off the back of the door. The sun shone strongly on the green of the playing fields. He buttoned the coat.

“My only regret is I never saw Part II and Part III. ”

“They were never made. I started Part II —we had to abandon it.”

“That’s a shame.… But you must finish it, Mr. Todd, you must. It is most extraordinary work. You mustn’t leave it incomplete.” At this he glanced at Hamish and gave an odd, high yelping laugh. Hamish joined in.

“Good one, Kurt,” he said.

Kurt shook my hand for the third time. “I mean it, Mr. Todd. I’ve never seen a movie like it. Finish it. I would be the most terrible waste.” He folded up the collar of his overcoat and turned to Hamish. “It looks fine, Hamish. I think you’re on the right track. Good-bye, Mr. Todd. It has been a most memorable meeting.” He left.

I looked at Hamish. “Who the hell was that?”

“Probably the most brilliant mathematician in the world.”

“Really?… Amazing that he saw The Confessions . What a coincidence.”

Hamish put some ice in his cocktail shaker. “He produced this theorem, the Incompleteness Theorem — that’s why we laughed. It was quite devastating.” He shook the shaker. “Changed the face of mathematics for all time.” He poured out two drinks and looked at me. “In fact I was going to write to you about it, try and explain Kurt’s theorem to you. It’s quite uncanny how it all fits together. Now you’re here, I can tell you about it.”

“Super,” I said.

Hamish handed me a glass.

“Good to see you, John.”

“Cheers.”

That night we had dinner in one of Zion’s better restaurants. I think we ate a kind of pot roast followed by ice cream. I can barely remember eating. Hamish talked constantly, and with the single-minded intensity of all lonely people, of quantum mechanics and its bizarre world of chance and supposition. He mentioned names: Einstein, Bohr, the Copenhagen Statement, de Broglie, thought experiments, Schrödinger’s cat. But he kept coming back to Werner Heisenberg and his Uncertainty Principle and how everything linked up with Kurt’s Incompleteness Theorem. Absolute truth, he said at one juncture, had been finally exposed as a chimera, an utterly vain ambition. In the sum of human knowledge there would always be crucial uncertainties. And Kurt had shown how even in the most abstract formal systems there would be holes, gaps and inconsistencies that could never be overcome.

Eventually we paid our bill and went outside. I felt stupid, my head stuffed with strange concepts. It was a warm night. I breathed slowly, deeply, as we walked back to the institute.

“Shifting sands, John. Shifting sands.”

“Yes?”

“We live in extraordinary times. They’ll call this the Age of Uncertainty. The Age of Incompleteness.”

“Yes,” I said again, simply.

“Strong stuff, isn’t it?” He paused. “Limits. Limits everywhere.”

“It’s rather depressing, in a way.”

“Why?” He seemed astonished at me. “There may be uncertainties, but don’t you think it’s better to live in the full knowledge of this than go on looking for illusory ‘truths’ that can never exist?”

“Well, yes. I suppose it is, actually.”

“It is, believe me. I find it all invigorating. Great gusts of fresh air. Like standing on top of Paulton Law. Remember?”

“God. Paulton Law.… I haven’t thought about the Academy in years.”

Hamish paused to light a cigarette. The flare of the match cast dark shadows in the rugged, pitted surface of his skin. I felt one of those epiphanic shudders of sadness pass through me — the sort that are meant to signal all manner of potential foreboding. I tried not to think of my future. What would be waiting for me up ahead? I hadn’t a clue.

“The Age of what did you say?” I asked.

“Of Uncertainty. The Age of Uncertainty and Incompleteness.”

“Seems pretty apt, now I come to think of it.”

“It is. Bang on.” He grinned. “That Kurt, he’s a clever old bugger. Set the cat among the pigeons. Remarkable.”

“I thought he seemed very nice.”

“I’m going to do some work on it, when I can find the time.”

“What?”

“Tying up Heisenbergs Uncertainty and Kurt’s Incompleteness.”

“Oh yes?”

“It’s all tremendously exciting.”

“I can see that.”

I blew cool air on my palms. For some reason they were suddenly hot and sweaty. We walked on in silence for a while.

“You’ll take care, won’t you, John?”

“What do you mean?”

“In Europe. The war. Don’t do anything, you know, foolhardy.”

I laughed. “No bloody fear, Hamish. No bloody fear.”

I left Hamish at Zion the next day. It had been a disquieting visit. We had gone back to his Quonset for a last drink and he went on talking for two more hours about Kurt and Heisenberg, Schrödinger and all that crowd. I felt slightly alarmed also: I was worried that he was becoming obsessed and he wanted me to share his obsession with him. I looked at his rows of calculating machines and asked him what he did with them all. He told me he was still working on prime numbers.

“Very, very big ones,” he said. “Enormous ones.” He thought he had found a way of devising an unbreakable cipher using these vast prime numbers. That explained why he was working for the government and why he had the rank of major.

He tapped out a number on a machine. It printed, “2,146,319,807.”

“That’s the largest prime number known to man,” he said. “I’m trying to find one half as big again.” He waved at the calculators. “With the help of these chaps. Once I’ve found that, I can make the code.”

He spent another hour explaining how the cipher would work, but it was all over my head.

I continued thinking about Kurt and his Incompleteness Theorem and its implications on the train back to New York. I was intrigued that the little man who loved my film had removed the foundations of certainty from the entire world of mathematics. How remarkable too that he had seen my film and how gratifying that it should have affected such an extraordinary man so. I felt a warm glowing surge of self-esteem within me. He was right, as well. The Confessions: Part I was a work of genius. It took one to recognize it. I knew its worth and I owed it to myself and to the world not to let it languish unfinished.

I looked out of the window at the New Jersey swamps. But first there was a war to get through.