Yannick Grannec - The Goddess of Small Victories

I looked around at my world with warm feelings. Kurt was dissecting his steak, trying in vain, despite his talents as a topologist, to reconstitute it into a smaller portion. Lili and Albert were laughing over a story. Robert was eating with one hand and smoking with the other, while Kitty daydreamed. The Morgensterns were cooing over each other in the way of young couples. I couldn’t stop myself from needling them.

“Still uncertain about our investment, Oskar?”

“I gave my honest opinion. This neighborhood isn’t the most practical to live in.”

“So Kurt will walk an extra twenty minutes. The broker told us that the house was sure to increase in value.”

“He could hardly say the opposite.”

My husband looked up from the puzzle on his plate.

“I hope this house won’t be too much for us. I hate the idea of being chained to such a big loan.”

“Why? Are you planning to return to Europe? You won’t even consider going to visit your sainted mother! Would you prefer to live in a student’s apartment until the day you retire?”

He frowned and pawed at his stomach, his usual answer to recriminations. Lili put a calming hand on my knee under the table. I pushed her away. Kurt wasn’t made of glass. Albert tried to smooth over my aggression by asking about my husband’s health, but I was in no mood to drop the subject.

“You’ve given him a new source of worry, Herr Einstein. Kurt worked for months on your birthday present.”

“You mean the engraving? I don’t understand.”

“I’m talking about his article on relativity. 27It got to the point where he stopped sleeping, poor dear.”

“Your husband was not the only one to suffer over that business. The editor was on the verge of a mental collapse. The text only reached him at the last moment and even then … If Gödel could have been at the foot of the printing press to go over his galleys once more, he would have done it!”

“You should have seen him picking apart the sales contract for this house!”

“If my presence is disturbing you, I can go and take my nap.”

“Don’t be upset, my friend. Your contribution didn’t get the reception it deserved, perhaps, but not because of the quality of your work. Who nowadays takes any interest in relativity?”

I now had the explanation for Kurt’s renewed insomnia. Again, all that effort for nothing. Would his time ever come? The curse of being always ahead. Or always a step to the side.

I’d had my own disappointment. I’d knitted a sweater for Albert in honor of his seventieth birthday, only to learn from Lili that he was allergic to wool. The useless sweater had gone to charity. The Gödels were both disappointed: Albert had expressed no more than polite enthusiasm for the engraving and for Kurt’s article. What is more unpleasant than being disappointed by a gift, unless it’s being the person whose gift is unappreciated? Lili had hit the jackpot: she had given Albert a heavy cotton pullover from Switzerland that she’d bought in an army surplus store, and the old codger wore it constantly. What an irony for a pacifist!

“What did this birthday present consist of, exactly?”

Oskar patted the hand of his young wife. “It’s too complicated to explain, Dorothy. Adele knows nothing more about it either.”

“I am perfectly well informed! Nothing he does can surprise me anymore. We might be able to travel through time? So what! Albert said it himself the other day: you can prove anything with mathematics.”

“You’re galloping a bit too far and too fast, Adele. You’ve probably taken on too much fuel.”

Lili walked right over Oskar’s acerbic comment.

“Is that really true? Then we actually do live in a sciencefiction world!”

My mollusk of a husband, sensing the energy levels growing more intense, retreated into his shell.

“Our friend Gödel is not a charlatan! Who does not know this?”

“Explain it to us, Herr Einstein! I’ll be able to tell my children that I had you as a teacher.”

Dorothy clapped her hands in excitement. She knew how to make men talk. I had a head start of twenty years in the matter, she had just as many years less on her hips. And Albert was not unswayed by her charms.

“Tell it to my children! They haven’t yet recovered from the experience.”

“Pour another glass for the master of time!”

“What I really need for this sort of performance is my pipe.”

I saw his young colleagues snort when he launched into a brief explanation of the mathematics of general relativity. His vocabulary was not unfamiliar to me. From listening to conversations, I’d acquired some basic notions of physics. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t picture his four-dimensional Jell-O: three dimensions in space and one in time. Maybe I didn’t have enough fingers. From what I’d understood, the ingredients Einstein assembled allowed a number of recipes to be prepared. His equations admitted of different solutions, each modeling a different possible universe. Even if it was difficult to imagine the existence of other worlds, it wasn’t impossible to conceive: with the same starting ingredients, I sometimes cooked very different dishes, from heavenly to horrible.

With his own mathematical cookery, my husband had exhibited the possibility of universes with indigestible geometry. In these worlds, space-time trajectories were closed loops in time, folding back on themselves. He had explained it to me by twisting my sewing ribbon. In other words, you could arrive at a station in the past with a ticket for the future. According to Kurt, if we traveled in a spaceship along a sufficiently large curve, we could, in this universe, go to any place in time and come back from it, just as in our universe we traveled through space.

This virtuosic game irritated Albert, who had never been, as he liked to say, a mathematical prodigy. He admitted that as an adolescent he had been bored stiff in math class, and his teachers had never seen any particular sign of talent in the slouchy youth. 28Faced with my husband’s work, he displayed the coy modesty of an old class dunce to avoid challenging him on the essentials. Kurt had pushed his extrapolation to the point where it resulted in a model of time at odds with Albert’s philosophical tenets. But it displeased Albert to air this kink in their friendship publicly. He twisted a strand of hair by his ear, looking for an acceptable way out.

“Our friend has a head for heights. He has had the most extraordinary fun with his mathematics.”

Kurt pushed his plate away and folded his napkin in a square. The frivolous tone of the conversation irritated him, making light of his irreducible quest for precision. Oskar supplied a measure of soft soap.

“Enlighten us, Kurt. We’re all friends here, and we know you won’t hold our amateurism against us. We’re truly curious.”

“I don’t see why I should have to explain myself to an audience, half of which can’t understand objective terminology. You know that this is not simply a theoretical game, Herr Einstein. I am counting on someone to find empirical proof for this cosmological model. In point of fact I’ve calculated the values for the speed of travel quite accurately.”

“Did you remember to pack sandwiches for the trip?”

My remark landed with a leaden thud. Robert squashed his cigarette end and drilled my husband with his radioactive gaze.

“I don’t cast doubt on your perfectionism for a single moment, Gödel. But neither you nor I can corroborate the possibility with the technology at present available.”

“I expect to confirm my theory from a study of astrophysical phenomena. The first lead is to establish a movement of orbital precession among all galactic systems.”