Yôko Ogawa - The Gift of Numbers aka The Housekeeper and the Professor

The next day, the Professor and I recopied his note tags. "I wonder where all this blood came from," he said, checking himself for a cut.

"Root, my son, hurt his hand with a knife-but it wasn't serious."

"Your son? That's terrible! It looks like it bled all over."

"No, he's just fine, thanks to you."

"Really? I helped?"

"Of course. How do you think the blood got on you?"

I pulled the notes from his suit one by one. Most were covered with an incomprehensible scrawl of math symbols-as though few things other than numbers were worth remembering.

"And when you finished helping Root, you taught me something important in the waiting room."

"Something important?"

"You taught me about triangular numbers, and the formula for finding the sum of the natural numbers from 1 to 10-something I could never have imagined, something sublime." I held out the most important note. "Shall we start with this one?"

The Professor copied out a new tag and read it quietly to himself.

"My memory lasts only eighty minutes."

I'm not sure if they were related to his mathematical abilities, but the Professor had some pretty peculiar talents. For instance, he could instantly reverse the syllables in a phrase and repeat them backward. We discovered this one day when Root was struggling to come up with palindromes for a homework assignment in Japanese.

"It doesn't make any sense, but it's the same forward and backward: 'A nut for a jar of tuna'-what's that supposed to mean? Nobody would trade a jar of tuna for a nut."

"Nut a for natu of jar a trade would dybono," the Professor murmured.

"What did you say, Professor?" Root asked.

"Sorfespro, say you did what?"

"What are you doing?"

"Ingdo you are what?" said the Professor.

"Mom, I think he's gone crazy," Root said.

"We'd all be crazy if we said things backward." The Professor sounded a bit sheepish. I asked him how he did it, but he didn't seem to know. He hadn't practiced, he did it almost without thinking, and had assumed long ago that it was something anybody could do.

"Don't be ridiculous," I told him. "I couldn't reverse syllables in my head like that. You could be in the Guinness Book , or on one of those TV shows."

The prospect of being on TV seemed to alarm the Professor; and yet, this trick came to him with even greater ease when he was anxious. One thing seemed clear, however: he was not reading the reversed syllables from a picture in his head. It was more a matter of rhythm, and once his ear had caught it, he instinctively flipped the syllables around.

"It's like solving a problem in mathematics," he said. "The formula doesn't just come floating into your head in finished form. It starts as a vague outline and then gradually becomes clearer. It's a bit like that."

"Can you do it again?" Root said, forgetting his homework. He was completely fascinated by the Professor's ability. "Let's see. Try Hanshin Tigers."

"Gersti shinhan."

"Radio calisthenics."

"Icsthenisca odira."

"The cafeteria had fried chicken today."

"Dayto enchick fried had riateecaf the."

"Amicable numbers."

"Bersnum blecaiam."

"I drew an armadillo at the zoo."

"Zoo the at lodilmaar an drew I."

Root and I tossed out sentences for the Professor one after another, challenging him with longer and tougher ones. At first, Root wrote out each one and checked it, but the Professor's performance was flawless, and Root eventually gave up. We simply said something-anything at all-and the Professor spoke it back to us in reverse syllables, without a second's hesitation.

"Unbelievable! It's awesome, Professor! You should show people. You should be proud. How come we didn't know after all this time?"

"I'm not sure what you mean," said the Professor. "What is there to be proud of?"

"But you should be proud! It's amazing! People would love to see this!"

"Thank you," said the Professor, looking down bashfully. He placed his hand on Root's flat head-a head oddly suited to supporting a hand. "This skill of mine is completely useless. Who needs a lot of scrambled-up words? But I'm glad you find it interesting."

The Professor thought of a palindrome for Root's assignment:

"I prefer pi."

The Professor had another talent: finding the first sign of the evening star in the afternoon sky.

"Ah!" he said one day from his easy chair, when the sun was still high up in the sky. Thinking he was talking in his sleep or muttering something to himself, I didn't answer. "Ah!" he said again, and pointed with one unsteady finger out the window. "The evening star."

He was not speaking to me, but to himself. I stopped what I was doing in the kitchen to look where he was pointing-though I couldn't see anything but the sky. Perhaps too many numbers are causing hallucinations, I wondered; but, as though he'd read my mind, he pointed once again. "Look, there it is."

His finger was wrinkled and cracked, and there was dirt under the nail. I blinked and tried to focus, but I couldn't see anything but a few wisps of cloud.

"It's a little early for stars," I said as gently as I could.

"The evening star means night is coming," he said, as if I'd never said a word. Then he lowered his arm and nodded off again.

I don't know what the evening star meant to him, perhaps finding it in the sky soothed his nerves, or maybe it was simply a habit. And I don't know how he could see it so long before anyone else-he barely noticed the food I set right in front of him. For whatever reason, he would point his withered finger at a single spot in the vast sky-always the right place, as I eventually discovered-and that spot had significance for him and no one else.

Root's cut healed, but his attitude was slower to recover. He behaved himself when we were with the Professor, but when it was just the two of us, he became moody and short. One day, when his clean, white bandage had begun to look dingy, I sat down in front of him and bowed my head.

"I'm sorry," I said. "It was wrong of me to doubt the Professor, even for a moment. I'm sorry and I apologize."

I thought he might ignore me, but he turned and looked at me with a very serious expression. He sat up straight, picking at the end of his bandage.

"All right, I accept. But I'll never forget what happened." And at that, we shook hands.

It was only two stitches, but even after he'd grown up, he still had the scar between his thumb and forefinger-proof of how much the Professor had cared about him.

One day while I was straightening the shelves in the Professor's study I came across a cookie tin buried under a pile of mathematics books. I gingerly pulled off the rusted lid, thinking I'd find moldy sweets, but, to my surprise, the box was filled with baseball cards.

There were hundreds of them, packed tightly into the large tin, and it was clear that the collection had been treasured by its owner. The cards were spotless, protected from fingerprints and dirt in individual cellophane wrappers. Not one was out of place nor was there a single bent corner or crease. Hand-lettered dividers labeled the players by position-"Pitchers," "Second Basemen," "Left Fielders"-and each section was in alphabetical order. And to a man, they were all Hanshin Tigers. They were perfectly preserved, but the pictures and player bios on them were quite old. Most of the photos were in black and white, and while I could follow a few of the references-"Yoshio Yoshida, the modern-day Mercury," or "the Zatopekesque pitching of Minoru Maruyama"-I was lost when it came to the "diabolic rainbow ball of Tadashi Wakabayashi," or "the incomparable Sho Kageura."

One player had been given special treatment: Yutaka Enatsu. Instead of being filed by position, he had a separate section all to himself. While the other cards were covered in cellophane, Enatsu's were protected by stiff plastic sheaths.