“Even in Vienna, Mozart has enemies,” Papa used to joke.
It was Papa who had learned about the Technische Hochschule for girls. He was a carpenter who’d worked on the building when it went up in 1912. After Martina had come home dazed by the rainbow in Frau Herschel’s nursery, Papa brought back bits of leaded glass left over from a job site so that he and Martina could make prisms. He brought home books on light and color that he found in secondhand shops. When Martina was seven, the two of them re-created Newton’s experiments with sunlight, making a rainbow out of one prism, using a second prism to turn the rainbow back into white sunlight.
Mama watched, tight-lipped, then dragged Martina to the table to work on her embroidery. Martina always bunched the thread, broke it, split it. Her practice work on scraps of linen made Mama fume.
Papa suggested to Martina that she learn to sign her name in embroidery stitches: something special, that she could use when she signed her school papers. Martina created a design that used Newton’s prisms as a symbol of herself, but the result when she sewed it was as abominable as the rest of her work. Mama wouldn’t let her stop sewing, but she gave up on any idea of Martina ever helping her in the workshop.
Papa learned about scholarships to the Technische Hochschule. He and Mama argued late into the night about fit jobs for girls, and whether Martina was becoming conceited because of her schooling, but when Martina was twelve and Austria was losing the war, she sat the scholarship and entrance exams. She was first in the city in mathematics. The next year, the first year after the war had ended, Papa escorted her to the lofty stone building on Elisabethstrasse.
Martina was wearing the uniform of the school, sewn by her mother with meticulous care: anger over husband and daughter for reaching above themselves was one thing, but none of the wealthy burghers’ daughters would ever taunt Martina for her clothes.
The streetcar was jammed with people going to work or looking for work, but when Papa helped Martina down from the high step, they had to pass clots of unemployed men who gathered daily on the streets. Many were still in their Imperial uniforms, ragged from four years on one front or another, and now the only clothes they owned. Like most Viennese, they were bewildered at losing the war, bewildered at loss of empire and emperor in one stroke of the French, American and British pens. A skinny Jewish girl in an upper-class school’s uniform would be an easy target for rage.
That was when Martina learned to hold herself so erect that she herself looked like the Empress: aloof, untouchable. Better than a backboard in her jacket.
Even now in the cave in the Austrian Alps, her posture infuriates the guards, who want her to bow her head, to grovel to them. She has been beaten more than once for her unbreakable arrogance.
In that visit to Herr Papp, his blindness seemed to give him a sixth sense for the emotions. Although Martina sat still, spine straight, he knew his words about her behaving like a hypotenuse hit a mark.
He laughed softly, a sound like dry leaves rustling underfoot. “Single-mindedness is not a crime, Fr?ulein Saginor. They say that the great Newton could go days without sleep, holding a problem in his mind like a kaleidoscope, turning it over until the array of colored pebbles showed him the pattern he was seeking in nature. So it is not a crime, Fr?ulein, for you to come here because you want something. I just question what an old blind mathematics professor can offer you, since you don’t even want Frau Werfel’s cake.”
It was true: Martina seldom thought about food in those days, and the cake looked unappetizing. For form’s sake she ate a bite, but it was so rich she quickly washed it down with tea.
“Leibniz,” she said.
“Leibniz?” Herr Papp echoed, incredulous. “You surely have not come here to discuss a seventeenth-century mathematician, not when you have the University of Vienna and the Institut für Radiumforschung available to you.”
“Do you see English—does anyone read English journals to you?” Martina asked.
“An old student reads French to me sometimes but no one who knows English comes to visit.”
“An Englishman named Turing wrote a paper last year on computable numbers and how they relate to the Entscheidungsproblem. He’s contradicting Professor Hilbert’s paradigm, which seemed like heresy. Recently, though, I’ve been wondering how to determine the structure of an atom when you can see electron scattering but have no idea what atom is scattering them. The computations can be done, in theory, but in practice—” Martina spread her hands, an expression of exhaustion that of course Herr Papp couldn’t see.
“In practice the work might take you years,” he finished for her. “And why did this make you think of Leibniz, and of me?”