Mark Dunn - American Decameron

Barend Kleerekoper taught mathematics at Coe College, a small college in Cedar Rapids. He was a good teacher and a favorite among his students, though he kept largely to himself and had no close friends. Dr. Kleerekoper had immigrated to the U.S. in 1934 from the Netherlands. When he lost his job teaching at the University of Groningen after the school experienced a severe drop in enrollment during the Dutch economic depression, the faculty of Coe’s mathematics department worked to bring him to their campus. The professors had long been admirers of his renowned achievements in irrational and transcendental number theory. They were happy to welcome him to their friendly town of solid, common-sense Iowa values, leavened by the kind of gentle, self-deprecating humor emblematized by native son Grant Wood’s popular and iconic American Gothic .

When Kleerekoper moved to the U.S., he left his whole family behind: his mother, father, and younger brother in Amsterdam, and his older brother and sister and their respective families in Rotterdam. A confirmed bachelor, Barend had never married.

The fate of the professor’s extended family was tragically sealed when the Netherlands fell to the Nazis in 1940. His sister and her husband died in the bombing of Rotterdam. The rest of the family was rounded up and sent to the death camps of Sobibor, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz. None survived.

By the end of the war, well-kept Dutch civil records confirmed exactly what had happened to each of Kleerekoper’s loved ones back in Europe. In the wake of this news, the professor was rarely seen outside his classroom. During the winter break between ’45 and ’46 he holed up in his tiny apartment near the college, only emerging to buy groceries once a week and on one occasion to visit a doctor. His eyes hurt him. The physician diagnosed eye strain and prescribed more rest. More shut-eye, the doctor said. Kleerekoper didn’t crack a smile; some American idioms still eluded him.

Kleerekoper’s fellow faculty members reached out to him during those long, dark months of mourning. He rejected their attempts to envelope him in the warmth of their holiday collegiality and cheer. Kleerekoper had always been a semi-solitary man. Now, his solitude seemed to have become permanent.

For this reason, Nancy Fairfax had hesitated going to him. It was her brother, Eli — who’d taken a couple of classes from the professor before the war — who talked her into it. Dr. Kleerekoper was the perfect candidate, said Eli, to tutor Nancy’s son in junior high math. It was the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and Nancy’s husband was still needed in Europe. Nancy operated a granulator at the city’s Quaker Oats factory (which made Cedar Rapids smell, on blustery days, like cooked oatmeal). Her son, Jim, wanted a career in military intelligence like his father, but first he had to pass eighth-grade algebra. Nancy wanted only the best for her son.

The best was Barend Kleerekoper.

She didn’t phone. Instead, she showed up at his door on the morning of December 26, 1945.

Still dressed in his pajamas and a tatty house robe, he at first tried to ignore the repeated sequence of knocks. He hoped that whoever it was would simply give up and go away. It was early. He hadn’t even opened the Gazette . Kleerekoper had been closely following the news coverage of the Nuremberg trials and was especially invested in learning the fate of the Netherlands’ murderous Reichskommissar, Arthur Seyss-Inquart (who several months later would be found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to hang).

His visitor didn’t go away. When Kleerekoper finally opened the door, he found a woman several years younger than his forty-seven years standing with chattering teeth in the unheated hallway.

“Hello,” she said, holding something round and flat upon the palm of her hand in the manner of a waitress. “My name is Nancy Fairfax. You taught my brother Eli several years ago. He’s spoken very highly of you ever since. Here’s a pie. It’s a Christmas pie. I know you’re Jewish and you don’t have to eat it, but I brought it anyway.”

“Why?”

“May I come in?”

“No, you may not come in. Why did you bring me a pie? Because I taught your brother several years ago? That isn’t logical.”

“If you want the truth, Dr. Kleerekoper, my son, Jim — he’s in the eighth grade. He needs a tutor. He’s going to fail math if he doesn’t get help.”

Barend Kleerekoper slammed the door shut, although he wasn’t entirely impolite about it. As the door was closing, Nancy heard the “Happy” part of “Happy holidays.”

He didn’t take the pie.

The pie did, however, find its way into his apartment later that day, when he stepped out to put his garbage into the chute and found the pie, reposed within a twined baker’s cake box, waiting for him on the thin square of footworn carpet that served as his welcome mat. He ate two slices that night. It was the first American Christmas pie he’d ever had — strawberry-rhubarb — and every bit as good as the eierkoekens and kruimelkoekjes he’d enjoyed as a boy in the Netherlands.

The professor discovered a box of homemade raisin and oat cookies in front of his door the next morning. Everyone ate raisin and oat cookies here in Oat Town, but these were especially good. “You can send me all the sweets you like,” he said to the baker in absentia, “but I have better things to do with my time than tutor a fourteen-year-old mathematical illiterate.” He put a forkful of the half-finished strawberry-rhubarb pie into his mouth and almost smiled. Pie. Pi. If only Mrs. Fairfax knew the unintended appropriateness of that first culinary bribe.

No one knew, in fact, how Professor Kleerekoper spent his solitary hours, because he saw no reason to share details of his private masterwork with his colleagues. Perhaps some might find merit in it, but he also risked exposing himself to ridicule from others.

Pi. A mathematical constant whose value is the ratio of any Euclidean plane circle’s circumference to its diameter. Arguably the most fascinating and most celebrated of irrational numbers — that is, numbers whose value can’t be expressed as a fraction m/n , where m and n are integers — its representation in decimal positional notation never ending and never repeating as a whole. Despite the fact that pi need only be taken to the tenth decimal point to give the circumference of the Earth to within a fraction of an inch (that point reached by Madhava of Sangamagrama late in the fourteenth century), mathematicians (both those of the professional stripe and rank pi-loving amateurs) have throughout the ages been calculating pi to as many decimal places as their abilities and the technological sophistication of their calculating hardware permitted.

Kleerekoper, in joining (though hermetically) this longstanding cerebral pastime (one that in only three short years would be removed to the realm of eye-popping supra-achievement through application of the electronic computer), found in his efforts both the solace-granting satisfaction and the calculative sanity necessary to combat his deep depression. Working with his mechanical desk calculator, he permitted the numbers to order themselves in that lackadaisical way that affirmed his belief that the universe was randomness writ large. That the guiding hand of God was the stuff of fairy tale. That loved ones were put to death by madmen only because good and evil were cards played out of the same deck of chance, and in a chaotic universe everything is possible, even the unimaginable.

Dr. Kleerekoper had heard Christians speak of God’s will. What God, the professor would have liked to have asked them, would ever countenance the genocide of millions? But he would not ask it, nor could he even allow himself to think it — to allow such musings to crowd his calculating brain cells. Only the day before — the day that Nancy Fairfax had come to his door to distract him with an errand of advocacy for her son — he had reached the 761st decimal place in the infinite number pi. He was certain that it was a world record, far surpassing the previous publicized record set in 1873 by an amateur mathematician in England by the name of William Shanks: 707 decimal places. And Shanks’ wasn’t even a valid record: both Kleerekoper and a fellow mathematician by the name of Ferguson, using similar mechanical calculators in 1944, had discovered that Shanks had erred at the 528th decimal place. Every digit thereafter was wrong and had to be corrected before his record could be bested.