by Miriam Sved
‘I don’t know when the last time they saw each other was,’ he says, ‘but it seems like my grandmother wants to take me to meet him, Kalmar, at his lecture. And after that she’ll help me with the money to get to MIT. Maybe she sort of sees it as my birthright.’ As soon as he stops speaking the noises from the next room expand to fill the space, and Bethany is smiling a small, infuriatingly enigmatic smile, so Josh babbles on. ‘I told Nagymama about my work in small world theory, the interesting stuff about tipping points, and she really got it. Like, most people I’ve shown the work to see the surface level but they don’t really understand the implications, how my theory could find patterns in all these seemingly random things in the world and online. And afterwards I started thinking about some of Kalmar’s work, and obviously she would have followed his career closely, if they were, you know, together. And in some ways, you could see this work I’m doing as, like, a modern corollary of some of his early stuff in Ramsey theory. I mean, they’re different branches of maths and mine’s much more applied, but they’re both about finding the patterns and order that are buried in these clusters that at first look like chaos. They’ve got the same kind of complexity contained in simplicity. I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at the base premises of one of his upper limit problems, but they start out with these incredibly simple geometric conditions, just a few dots on a Euclidean plane. Think of a small constellation of stars. And from those basic structures you spin out so quickly until you’re looking for generalisations that can explain, like, neural networks or organic evolution, the physical laws of the universe. Kalmar saw that, way back when he was about the same age as me, and maybe Nagymama was there for those early developments of his work, and maybe watching me develop my work and knowing what she knows about where I come from, who I come from, it must be sort of like watching the stars align the same way in different centuries, different countries.’
As Josh reaches a crescendo so too do the noises next door, and they come crashing down over each other in a descent of sighs and then giggles with a synchronicity that must surely be too well timed to be true.
Bethany, who has sat serenely through both performances, doesn’t acknowledge the end of the operatic one in Max’s bedroom, but points at Josh with her bottle of beer. ‘All that stuff is great,’ she says. ‘Great for you. But what about Nagymama? What do you think she actually wants with Kalmar, now, for herself?’
The room is blessedly quiet without the sexual orchestra next door. Josh considers the question, really considers it.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. Then, ‘Her husband has just died.’
It should be a shocking idea – when he’d suggested it to Max he’d meant it to shock – but now Josh finds it almost painfully sad, and also sort of wonderful. Is it possible that, in some part of her that the rest of them never knew about, Nagymama has been waiting all this time to go home? Not to Hungary, which she has noisily and regularly disowned (anti-Semitic pigs), but to some other, figurative point of origin. Josh has seen pictures of Pali Kalmar – giving speeches, accepting awards – and one piece of video footage played during a lecture. An incredibly stooped old man with a big nose, thick round glasses and a grey mop of crazy hair. The age-defying, gravity-defying exuberance of his hair has surely contributed to the myth and aura of Kalmar, so perfectly pitched for the eccentric genius archetype (Kalmar worked briefly, at the Institute for Advanced Study, alongside the even better-known crazy-haired great one), and from there Josh suddenly makes the connection, so obvious, with his own springy mop of hair, and he reaches up and fingers a wedge of it with a new appreciation.
Bethany smiles. ‘Maybe we’ll get to the bottom of you yet.’
∴
Budapest, 1938
I suppose I should tell you now about what happened when Pali and I travelled to Vienna. It fills me with shame to think about it. And also a kind of disbelieving horror: to think that we walked, Pali and I, so defenceless and unprepared through a city of the German Reich. I was close enough to a group of Wehrmacht soldiers that I could see a nick on one of their chins, presumably from shaving (how amusing, I thought, that one of those super-humans might do something as humble as cutting himself shaving). Things were never the same after that day. Although I can’t entirely blame the Reich for that.
We had an early start, meeting at the grand dome of Keleti station. Pali, to my surprise, was on time. He was also unusually respectable in appearance, in a suit only slightly too large and not comprehensively crumpled. The first of the day’s workers flowed around us into and out of the station, and I allowed myself a moment’s wonder at being there alone with Pali, on the cusp of some great adventure. I was struck by the sight of a little white handkerchief peeking from the pocket of his shirt – silk, neatly folded. Who would have thought of such a thing? Not Pali, surely, and we made him swear he would not tell his parents of our day trip, for fear that his mother would intervene somehow. Perhaps a servant had done it? I didn’t ask him, we only stood surveying each other like children coming face to face for the first time. For once I didn’t feel self-conscious in his presence. I was happy in my choice of a blue tailored dress with a flattering neckline.
After a moment Pali offered me his arm in quite a gallant style, and the whole thing became like a game or an alternative reality, the two of us strolling as any respectable couple might towards our platform. Pali broke the silence only once to relate a mathematical oddity as we passed under the domed clock. (Do you know, Eszti, that the ancient Japanese built their temples with curves that have the properties of hyperbolic paraboloids?)
The sense of elaborate performance didn’t end when we were in the train. We found an empty carriage and Pali slid the door open and stood aside formally to let me enter first. The spell was only broken when we were just pulling out of the station and an older couple bustled into the carriage. Pali nodded to them and tucked his long legs in to give them space opposite.
It was a quiet journey until, at an outer station, a mother and small child came in, the young girl rather adorable and shy, hiding behind her mother’s skirts and making forays out to peek theatrically at the rest of us in the carriage. Pali, who is surprisingly good with children, coaxed her out in a game that consisted of dangling a ten-pengo note and then dropping it through her waiting fingers, challenging her to grab it before it hit the ground. The older couple seemed entranced, laughing and exclaiming along with the child, and when Pali put the money away the child’s mother smiled warmly at both of us. So there was no reason for uneasiness.
And yet, at some stage during the early part of the journey my sense of adventure and jollity gave way to a creeping dread. I looked at Pali and wondered if the others in our carriage had marked him or me out as Jewish – particularly Pali, with his striking nose and unconfined curls. I have rather generic looks, with light eyes and unremarkable features, which I have been told (in the way of a compliment) are thoroughly Magyar. But somehow, as the train picked up speed and we were travelling through the countryside, I started to feel a sort of shame crawl over me. I wanted to hide myself. I don’t know when we crossed the border, but by the time we were in Austria, with the snow-flecked mountains rising up and everything a darker shade of green, I had become neurotically convinced that I was emitting some shameful smell, like the taunts I occasionally heard from peasant children in the neighbourhood park: If you breathe in deeply, you can smell the Jew. When the ticket conductor came around I found myself shrinking back in mild terror – ticket conductors being, I suppose, authority figures somewhere on the same spectrum as police and the government and even brown shirts – and I clutched my handbag protectively to my chest while Pali dealt with the business of the ticket stubs. So much for the idea of myself as some intrepid revolutionary. How terrible if Tibor found out the extent of my cowardice.
As always happens when one is reluctant to arrive at a destination, the journey felt unnaturally short. I had broug
ht some bread and salami, which Pali ate enthusiastically while I forced a little down. The mother and child got out at Gyor, but the old couple travelled the whole way with us and we all disembarked at the Südbahnhof. Pali, continuing his uncharacteristic gallantry, handed me down from the carriage and I tried to square my shoulders and straighten my spine, to remind myself that we were here for Pali. Here in a German-controlled city, in the very heart of the Reich we had been reading about forever.
‘Well,’ Pali said. ‘Do you think we have time for a heisse Schokolade before the appointment?’
I couldn’t help but laugh, which was useful, as otherwise I might have stood there gaping at my first sight of the troops of the Reich. There were five or six of them near the doors to the station, my impression of them overwhelmed by their boots and armbands. Of course, the great fear was of having our papers checked – we had no idea, really, what the consequences would be of the little Isr next to ‘Religion’ – but luckily there were crowds flowing out of the station and we were able to submerge ourselves in a wave of people that took us past the troops. Then we were out in the street. I felt a great sense of unreality about being in that beautiful city I had visited so many times, now aloof and alien to me. Almost everything was the same, yet all I could see was its strangeness: many of the shops shuttered, broken glass from the second- and third-storey windows of one of the apartment buildings near the station. A sign in bright red on the doorway: Juden.
I took Pali by the arm and said, ‘Let’s hail a taxi.’
When we were safe inside a car, the streets that flitted past were still surreal. There were many more disturbing sights: more shuttered stores, broken windows. So many troops everywhere, mostly just idling. We passed houses and I wondered, Is there a Jewish family cowering inside? In that one, or that one? The very clouds seemed lower than usual, a watchful and threatening sky. But there were also children playing in a little park near the station. Ladies in stylish hats clacked down the sidewalk arm in arm, one holding the hand of a small boy with an ice-cream cone, which he licked as if it were the only thing in the world. I could not decide if I was in a normal city or at the gates of hell. Pali and I were very quiet and the driver got us to the university with no disasters. I paid him, my fingers shaking only slightly.
Once we were in the university grounds I began to feel a little better. I don’t know if you have ever been there: the main building with its stately facade, then a series of quadrangles whose grandeur seemed to reduce us and our silly problems to the level of squabbles between children. I felt that nothing too bad could happen within such architecture, such proof of human endeavour and cooperation. (Ignoring, I suppose, the salient counterexample we were given in the equally dignified grounds of our own university last year.)
In his communication with Tibor the professor had given directions to his office, through a side entrance, across two internal squares, down a little flight of steps to a semi-basement room where the door was slightly ajar. Pali pushed it further open and we were looking into a small dim room, very tidy, with an oak desk taking up most of the space. A man sat at it reading some papers, his face close to the desk and slack with concentration. He didn’t notice us at the door. Pali made a small noise, and when the man looked up there was no change to the blank mask of his face. I felt a moment of panic: we had come to the wrong place and would be shooed away like naughty children or, worse, handed over to the authorities. Then he seemed to come to himself; he blinked and his features reformulated into friendly shapes. He stood and came towards us and I registered that he was tall, built on a large scale. He wore little round glasses that looked too small on his face.
‘You must be the great Pali Kalmar I have been promised,’ he said in accented Hungarian, ushering us into the room and closing the door (would it be damaging, I wondered, to be caught meeting with us?). He reached out his hand to Pali. There was a painful moment when I thought Pali might baulk and turn strange – he does not like casual physical contact and has been known to spring away from it – but he managed the whole thing perfectly well, shaking the professor’s hand and even supplying some polite formalities about our trip: Thank you, yes, we found the office without any problem. Herding us towards the desk, the professor said, ‘And no … complications on the streets?’ I thought of the shattered glass on the footpath, red paint on the shopfronts and doorways. Complications. I blinked stupidly and said nothing.
Throughout the early stages of the meeting I stayed quiet, and I watched with a kind of awe as Pali chatted quite smoothly with the professor. He acquitted himself so well, I remember thinking that perhaps Ildiko was right that we had infantilised and underestimated him. He even managed to explain my lurking presence. ‘My friend Eszti is also a mathematician,’ he said. ‘She has come along to make sure I don’t disgrace myself.’
The professor laughed politely and nodded to me. ‘It is very good to meet you, my dear,’ he said. ‘I’m sure anyone in this brilliant young group will be worth my time.’
I gabbled some demurral of any presumed brilliance, but the professor continued on charmingly in this sort of vein, bringing us round to our brilliant friend Tibor, whose work the professor had stumbled across through the student mathematics competition, and the brilliant work of Pali’s to which Tibor had generously introduced him. The work was the thing to focus on in these dark times, he said, and he was sure we were working on other brilliant contributions to the decade’s mathematical breakthroughs.
This was enough of a lure for Pali, who launched into a description of the sieve problem that was his current preoccupation – he was using Gauss and a probabilistic method to get to a better estimate for the number of primes in an interval. I started to feel calmer and to recover my sense of purpose, and I watched as the professor nodded and made brief murmurs in response to Pali’s propositions about his dual approach. His smile never waned, and once he said, ‘An interesting idea,’ and, ‘Yes, that could be a worthwhile approach.’
And yet somehow he did not look quite focused on Pali’s words. His gaze had a diffuse kind of vacancy behind the spectacles, and sometimes would slip from Pali’s face onto me, or the papers on his desk that we had diverted him from, or to the window out to the little courtyard. His left hand, resting on the desk, kept performing a specific tapping sequence, as though he was practising some exercise on an imaginary keyboard. His nails were square and neat. Pali, I am sure, did not notice any of this, but continued on about gaps between consecutive primes. I couldn’t have followed all the by-ways of his argument, but it was a series of steps with which I was familiar from one of our conversations at the statue. That discussion as well had started with Cramér’s probabilistic approach, and I quickly recognised the trajectory Pali was on. At the statue he had followed it with the enthusiastic involvement of the rest of us – most usefully Tibor and Ildiko, always the quickest to pick up and develop his ideas – but now with Professor Voigt he was sustaining quite enough momentum on his own. I watched the professor closely, wondering if he could see the direction in which Pali’s thoughts were moving. If so, I did not think he was convinced: he continued to look quite preoccupied and, to my alarm, began to interrupt Pali’s flow with questions that didn’t seem related to the point.
Pali had just moved on to the Riemann hypothesis and the predictions that follow from it when the professor said, ‘Many Jews now are trying to emigrate to Palestine. But I suppose the political situation for you people is not so concerning in Hungary as it is here.’
It wasn’t quite clear from his inflection whether this was a statement or a question. Pali – never easy to divert from mathematics once he is in stride – seemed barely to notice the interruption. He only gave a distracted little nod and continued on with the Riemann hypothesis, contrasting it now with Hardy and Littlewood’s conjecture. But it seemed that the professor wanted to talk Jews instead of mathematics – or, rather, he wanted to talk about what he had called �
�the political situation’.
With Pali still deep in the spectrum of primes and still a fair distance from the endpoint of this line of thought (which I was now anticipating with some dread), the professor sat back in his chair, laced his hands across his chest and said in a contemplative way, ‘I suppose that the Jews have been better integrated in Hungary and have assimilated more with the general population over the years.’ That same ambiguity of inflection making it difficult to know whether he was offering his own observation or asking us a question about our country.
Pali, mid-derivation, paused with his hands describing the growing gaps, his articulate hands. I saw a small struggle pass across his face as if he was being physically wrenched out of his beautiful abstract world into the harsh light of reality, and I felt quite affected by it. I wanted to shield Pali and let him keep going with his primes, even if their endpoint was a doomed and romantic proposition. Especially if it was.
