by Miriam Sved
I said, ‘Clearly it is not as bad for us in Hungary as it is here.’
The professor turned his eyes to me and blinked, as though a bird or a piece of furniture had started to speak.
‘The police do not lock us up or beat us – at least, not without some kind of pretext. Nevertheless, it has been difficult for us for some time, and they say that Horthy is increasingly under the influence of the Germans.’ (I almost said the small German psychopath.) ‘In some ways, until now it has been worse in Hungary even than in Germany. Especially for young people.’
‘How so?’ The professor cocked his head slightly. Unlike when Pali was elaborating on his number theory, he appeared to be completely focused.
‘It is the professional situation,’ I said. ‘We have been effectively locked out of all the public institutions. It began in the twenties with the numerus clausus. I have relatives who had to emigrate to America so that my cousin could continue his engineering studies. And since then there have been laws that limit our employment in almost every profession. In some ways we are lucky.’ I gestured to Pali and myself. ‘My friends and I at least can continue with our own work, and there will always be a demand for private tutoring that cannot be regulated away. But we are not allowed any glimpse of a secure or independent future. All of us must go on living with our parents without any means of establishing ourselves. It is difficult even to consider marriage in the present situation.’
Pali and the professor were looking at me with expressions that seemed to mirror each other – a bemused kind of interest. I wondered if it had ever occurred to Pali that other people were suffering from the state of forced unemployment in which we existed. To him, of course, what we did probably seemed like the height of industry.
‘Very unfortunate,’ the professor said, still sitting back in his chair in a way that made him look contemplative and somehow powerful, as if at any moment he might sit forward, wave his hand and declare the Jews of Hungary – of the world – free to flourish. Perhaps we had come to regard him in this light, as our own personal saviour. But instead he said, ‘Of course I could see the sense in the numerus clausus. The Jews have always been highly over-represented in universities. It’s my opinion that if the authorities had introduced such a mechanism in Germany, something that limited the influence and wealth of minorities to appropriate levels, the public resentment might not have built up to such a degree.’
The hairs on my neck actually prickled to hear it: our saviour, in whom we had invested such hope, adopting so fluently the rhetoric that was used to cut us down. I might perhaps have said something reckless and foolish but he did not leave space for me to interject. ‘Naturally,’ he went on, ‘I have a great deal of sympathy for the Jews. Properly assimilated, they are perfectly capable of becoming good patriotic citizens. Even in my own family …’ Here he lowered his voice and leaned forward, and Pali and I instinctively did the same. ‘On my father’s side, the paternal grandmother was of the Israelite faith.’ A subtle wrinkle of his gentile nose. ‘But my father converted when he was young and in no more than two generations all of that has been bred out of the family.’ Nodding sagely, as if he had personally overseen this healthy breeding.
There was a silence then, the professor sitting back again in his seat in a satisfied way. I felt too slow-witted to know how to clamber back from this strange detour. Pali was looking at the professor with that distant, dreamy expression he got when the material world had not sustained his interest and he had gone to some internal refuge of numbers.
Finally I said awkwardly, ‘We – I mean, none of us – is … observant.’ Aware as I said it of the spectre of Nagymama and what she would think of this disavowal. It was true, but it was also a betrayal, to curry favour with this de-Jewed professor.
‘None of you?’ he said.
‘Levi used to go to shul,’ Pali said, to my surprise. ‘But I told him he was worshipping a fairy tale and that I could disprove the existence of God mathematically, and he seems to have come to his senses.’
I looked to the professor anxiously to see how he was taking this casual blasphemy. He only nodded and said, ‘And Levi is in the same mathematical group as you and young Tibor?’
‘Yes,’ said Pali, ‘it is Eszti and me, Levi, Tibor and Ildiko.’ To my further surprise he pulled a small bill wallet from his breast pocket and from it extracted a photograph. I got a glimpse as he passed it to the professor and I recognised it at once: the four of us – Ildiko and I, Tibor and Levi – leaning against a smooth crag of rock with Pali on the grass at our feet, holding his knees and smiling broadly at the camera. I knew the day immediately, I remembered the photograph being taken, but I had not known that it ended up with Pali, much less that he carried it around with him. I was touched. I felt a kind of protectiveness seeing the photograph in the professor’s large hand – he held it by one corner as though it were some artefact that might prove to be infectious, but he seemed to be studying it closely.
‘Tibor Weisz,’ he said, pointing. ‘I recognise him from his photograph in the school mathematics journal, it appeared many times. And this young lady I recognise too. It was unusual seeing a female face with such regularity in the journal.’
‘That is Ildiko,’ Pali said. ‘She says she will be able to counter my proof of the nonexistence of God through elementary means. She is very good, so she might be able to do it, but it will not be a direct disproof, merely one by contraposition.’
The professor looked at Pali blankly.
‘Not that she is a believer,’ I said, feeling slightly discombobulated. ‘It is all just a game.’ I wished I could snatch the photograph from his hands.
‘Quite so,’ the professor said. ‘And did you all attend the university together?’
I answered quickly, ‘Yes, we all entered the Pázmány Péter University the same year.’ Entered, a suitably ambiguous verb. I looked at Pali anxiously out of the corner of my eye and gave my head a little shake, afraid that he would elaborate on his unofficial status at the university or, worse, launch into his unconventional ideas about the imaginative vortex of institutionalised education.
The professor was still studying the photograph. ‘And do you all work together?’ he asked. ‘For instance, on the Hasse proof that Tibor Weisz submitted to the competition?’
‘Yes,’ said Pali, ‘often. Although that problem was not particularly interesting. Tibor likes to win things, it is in his calculus. So does Ildiko. So they enter this competition, that competition, and sometimes if the problems are interesting we might discuss them after the work has been submitted. But usually those sorts of problems have the solutions sitting there just below the surface, so there is not much for us to do.’
The professor, still holding the photograph, moved his eyes between it and Pali, that small enigmatic smile on his face. It was difficult to know what he was thinking; I felt a faint air of confusion radiating from him, as if he was waiting for one of us to clarify something that he was too polite to draw attention to. Pali seemed unconcerned – he held out his hand to take the photograph back and said, ‘As I was saying,’ and went back into the primes spectrum he had been diverted from. The professor took a last look at the photograph before handing it back, and nodded vaguely when Pali asked him to consider again his new combination of the sieve of Eratosthenes with Gauss’s results on the density of primes.
‘You can probably see where I am going,’ Pali said.
The professor raised his eyebrows. It was unclear whether or not he could see where Pali was going.
Pali said, ‘I mean to solve the prime number theorem by elementary means. Using the sieve. I think I will have it very soon, although Tibor thinks it is hubris. I told him to go back to his slide rule if he is so cowardly, for the origin of hubris comes from the Greek hybris, to challenge the gods, and the only godlike things in the universe are numbers, which are there to be challenged and thereb
y understood, so the idea of hubris is silly. Did you know that in the Middle Ages the monks worshipped the perfect numbers, particularly 6 and 28?’
The professor nodded slightly, maintaining that appearance of simultaneously knowing and not-knowing, the Gödel of human responses. But when he said, ‘So you mean to crack the big one. An ambitious young man,’ I knew that it was hopeless. He thought we were ridiculous. I felt myself sinking inwardly: how inept I had been not to have kept Pali better on track. On our way to the university I should have reminded him of other people’s limitations. In our small group he could talk freely of solving the greatest mathematical problem known to the world, and I think that even Tibor, with his practical mind and nominal disapproval of romantic pursuits, wondered if Pali might actually be able to do it. But not the professor, this man who was a stranger to us with his neat office and manicured hands. To him it must have sounded like an absurdity.
I exerted myself then and tried to smooth the meeting over by talking about other work, about how the prime number theorem was just one of a number of projects Pali was working on. But I think I made it worse, for the professor said, ‘You will turn us all out of our jobs, young man, if you crack the primes and additive bases.’
I think Pali was pleased at this. He said, ‘The thing to remember is that it is all connected. The primes will open the door to many other fields, some of them not even thought of yet. Look at the connections between prime factors and probability theory.’
I slumped down in my seat, despondent. The professor was looking down at the papers on his desk while he continued to nod at Pali’s words. He was unfailingly polite for the rest of the short meeting, but he had moved on from us, and when he looked up from his papers it was with a vague air of surprise, as though he did not expect us still to be there. And soon there was a pretext to usher us away (‘I have a graduate student coming to see me soon, I really should prepare …’).
Pali, who had managed so well with the introductions, turned wooden and strange when it came to the niceties of leave-taking; he ignored the professor’s outstretched hand and instead made an odd little bow from the waist. I reached out to take the dangling hand and the professor blinked from Pali to me as though he could not remember who we were or how we had got into his office.
‘Goodbye, and thank you again for seeing us,’ I said.
‘Yes, my pleasure. I hope you don’t run into any trouble going back.’
‘We will be fine, I’m sure,’ I said, only then thinking with a further sinking in my stomach about how we would have to venture out into the hostile streets and make our slow way back to the safety of home.
We all lingered for an awkward few moments at the door. I think Pali was only distracted by the social etiquette of saying goodbye. For my part, I had some faint, dying hope that the professor would say something encouraging before we left, any small thing to justify the risks we had taken in going there.
‘Well, auf Wiedersehen,’ he said.
I ushered Pali through the doorway. It did not escape my attention that the professor had defaulted, as the last thing, to speaking to us in German.
I think that, when we got out into the street, I was struggling under some kind of existential malaise. Perhaps we both were. How else to explain the foolishness of not immediately trying to hail a taxi but instead wandering on foot in the direction of the station?
Pali seemed to have reverted to type, drifting dreamily along beside me with no apparent awareness of the outside world. Perhaps he was shaken; perhaps he was more aware of the dynamics of the meeting than I give him credit for. I could almost have been angry with him: what a time to pull out his crazy claim to the prime number theorem! But the spark of anger could not take flame, because as soon as we were away from the sense of adult authority exuded by the professor I couldn’t see the craziness of Pali’s claim anymore. Levi had teased him a little when he first came out with the pronouncement – Herr Genius – and Tibor had made the declaration about hubris. But even Tibor had gone on to consider seriously the idea of the sieve of Eratosthenes, and had said, ‘I think it is possible. If anything might get you there, I think it will be a sieve, although it will take you more than the months remaining in this year.’ And we had all spent the rest of the afternoon throwing around ideas about how to best combine the sieve with Gauss’s results. It was this kind of response, I knew, that Pali had looked for and expected from Professor Voigt. He had not proffered his claim to the great Gauss throne as a boast, but as an invitation to play. I remembered the bland smile with which the professor had raised his eyebrows and cocked his head slightly, and I felt how badly the meeting, the whole situation, had been handled.
While I was lost in these depressing thoughts we had wandered down the street beside the Volksgarten, which was quite busy, and I felt that people were looking at us. A stylish woman in a jaunty little headpiece passed close to us; Pali brushed against her and she turned and stared rudely at us. I had an impression of many bicycles on the roads and not so many cars. We turned a corner to walk away from the gardens and found ourselves heading towards a small crowd of men and women on the footpath. Some people were down on the ground on their hands and knees. At first I couldn’t make sense of the scene. The onlookers were jeering, and I saw Germans among them, three uniforms. I thought, for a horrendous moment, that they were attacking the people on the ground. But then I saw there were buckets, and water sloshing around on the paving stones. They were scrubbing the street: the people on their knees, perhaps five or six men and women with their heads bent, their backs rounded against the crowd of onlookers. I could not see their faces but the shape of their bodies bent over like that made them all look old, particularly the women. Somehow the very ordinariness of the task they were performing made the whole thing seem monstrous, terribly wrong. There were children in the crowd; two boys watched with smiles on their faces. All the people stood close, crowding around, and the noises that came from them were ugly and inchoate. I could make out the odd slur: Judenschwein. The officers stood towards the front as though holding back the surging crowd; their boots were awful, ominously close to the people on the ground. We were still walking towards this scene, on the other side of the street from it, but before we had to pass by we came to a smaller side street and I hustled Pali away along it. The whole thing took only a few seconds but it seemed to fracture my sense of reality, and after that we were wandering blindly down streets I didn’t recognise, although I know the area well. I gave up on the idea of a taxi and we stayed away from the thoroughfares; I knew the general direction of the station. On the side of a building there loomed a huge image of the small German psychopath; we cut away from it, down a narrow alleyway, slinking through the streets.
In this way it took us quite a long time to reach the station, and when we arrived our train was already huffing by the platform. We found an empty carriage and I slid the door closed behind us, aware that I was holding back some great tide in my chest. When we sat down, Pali by the window, I immediately started to shake. I felt very cold despite the warmth of the carriage.
‘Eszti, you are a leaf,’ Pali said, looking at me with concern.
‘I’m fine.’ I wrapped my arms around myself to try to stop the trembling, ashamed of my weakness.
He took off his overcoat and put it around me. Good, thick wool (all his clothes were high quality, although he managed to make them seem somehow ragged when they covered his body). This gesture, the intimacy of it, further loosened the shaky bones of my chest; I thought for a horrible moment that I might cry.
‘Thank you,’ I said, ducking my head. ‘I’ll be all right in a minute.’
Pali was surprisingly tactful then; he turned his face to the window and let me recover myself slowly as the train started to move. As soon as we were on our way out of the city my pall began to lift and my body to warm up.
‘You can have your coat back now,’ I said when I
had almost stopped shaking.
Pali only smiled and flicked his hand dismissively.
He put his head back against the seat and closed his eyes for a few seconds. I watched him, feeling quite surreptitious: it was unusual to catch him in repose. He opened his eyes and I looked away quickly.
‘You look tired,’ I said. ‘What a day it has been.’
And then, because his coat felt warm and comforting around me and because I didn’t want to think, just yet, about the horrible feeling of Vienna or the failure of all our hopes in the professor, I said, ‘Pali, I didn’t know you had that photo of the five of us.’
He twisted his mouth in a sort of sheepish pout. ‘You probably don’t remember the day, Eszti,’ he said, ‘but it was a critical point in my calculus.’
‘Of course I remember it.’ I tried to keep my voice light when I said, ‘Can I see it again, please – the photo?’
There was a moment of confusion when he reached towards me, a stammering of hands; then I realised it was the coat he was reaching for. The breast pocket.
‘Oh, stupid of me.’ I hope I didn’t blush. I opened the coat’s lapel and could see the little wallet resting there, and I pulled the photo out of it with exaggerated care, noting the good condition in which Pali had kept it, unlike the general state of his possessions.
The day the photo was taken was stamped bright in my memory: an early autumn day in our first weeks at the university. We went on a hike in the hills around Buda: not just the five of us but the whole large crowd in which we moved during those weeks. I felt very glum around that time. I think it was partly because of entering the university and realising (how strange this will sound) that I was Jewish. Of course I had always known it in a factual sense, but before that I had not felt the full weight of what it meant: our education at the gymnasium was so sheltered from those social divisions. What a shock, during the first days and weeks at the university, to look around and realise that the general air of chill and unwelcome was not merely due to my own gaucheness or the lofty nature of the place, but that everybody knew. The gentiles knew who we were, those of us who had managed to get over the walls of the numerus clausus. And we, seemingly intuitively, recognised each other and banded together. I suppose this solidarity should have been comforting, drawing me into the group, but it was not. To be massed so accidentally with so many others, people I had not chosen but who just happened to be in the same minority grouping. I had drifted, lost in the crowd, hardly speaking to anyone besides Ildiko. She knew many of them and was on conversational terms with a few, because she had done so well over the years in the national mathematics and physics competitions.
