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work at the dinner table? Today I proved the possibility of space-time travel, would you pass the salt, darling?”
    “Was that how it was at your house?”
    “I didn’t have meals with my parents.”
    “I see. A middle-class upbringing?”
    “Prophylaxy.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “I had an old-fashioned upbringing.”
    Anna’s childhood was continually beset with domestic chaos, carefully kept behind padded doors. Dinners alone with the governess, private schools, dance and music lessons, smocked dresses, and a general inspection before being trotted out into company. Returning from parties where her mother had flitted around the room and her father had pontificated in a corner, she would curl up in the backseat of the car pretending to be asleep to avoid being asphyxiated by their conversation.
    The young woman smiled bitterly, and Adele chose to examine her fingers.
    Apparently satisfied, Adele said, “To be perfectly frank, at the start of our relation, I harassed him. I couldn’t stand to be left out. I had no access to the greater part of his life. But I had to learn my place. It wasn’t why I was there. It really wasbeyond me, even if I didn’t want to admit it! And … we had other worries.”
    Anna poured the old woman a glass of water for her dry mouth. Adele took it with a hesitant hand. She tried unsuccessfully to keep it from trembling.
    “Kurt was searching for perfection and opposed to any idea of vulgarization. It implies a kind of compromise and inexactitude. What I know about his work I gleaned from others. I listened a great deal.”
    “When did you realize how important he was?”
    “Right away. He was a small star at the university.”
    “Were you present at the birth of the incompleteness theorem?”
    “Why? Are you planning to write a book?”
    “I’d like to hear your version. The theorem became a kind of legend to a group of initiates.”
    “It always made me laugh, all these people talking about that fucking theorem. The truth is, I would be surprised if even half of them understood it. And then there are the people who use it to demonstrate anything and everything! I know the limits to my understanding. And they are not due to laziness.”
    “Don’t your limits make you angry?”
    “Why fight something you can’t do anything about?”
    “It doesn’t sound like you.”
    “You think you know me already?”
    “There’s more to you than you let on. But why me? Why do you let me come back and visit?”
    “You didn’t hesitate to strike back at me. I hate condescension. And I like your mix of apologeticness and insolence. I’d like to find out what you’re hiding under that first-communion skirt of yours.”
    Deftly, she tucked a stray lock of hair under her turban.
    “Do you know what Albert used to say? Yes, Einstein was one of our friends. A conversation stopper, isn’t it? Ach! How he bored us with saying it!”
    Anna leaned in so as not to miss a word.
    “ ‘The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious.’ Of course, it can be understood as relating to faith. I read it differently. I’ve brushed up against mystery. Telling you the facts will never transmit the experience.”
    “Tell it to me as a good story. I won’t write a report when I get back to the office. It has nothing to do with them. Just you and me, and a cup of tea.”
    “I’d prefer a little bourbon.”
    “It’s still daylight out.”
    “Then a sip of sherry.”

8
    AUGUST 1930
    The Incompleteness Café
    I have refrained from making truth an idol, preferring to leave it to its more modest name of exactitude.
    —Marguerite Yourcenar,
The Abyss
    On my nights off, I waited for him outside the Café Reichsrat across from the university. It wasn’t my sort of café, being more for talking than drinking. The talk was always of rebuilding the world, a project I saw no need for. On that night the meeting was to focus on preparations for a study