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

How exactly does a man live with only eighty minutes of memory? I had cared for ailing clients on more than one occasion in the past, but none of that experience would be useful here. I could just picture a tenth blue star on the Professor's card.

From the main house, the cottage appeared deserted. An old-fashioned garden door was set into the hawthorn hedge, but it was secured by a rusty lock that was covered in bird droppings.

"Well then, I'll expect you to start on Monday," the old woman said, putting an end to the conversation. And that's how I came to work for the Professor.

Compared to the impressive main house, the cottage was modest to the point of being shabby: a small bungalow that seemed to have been built hastily. Trees and shrubs had grown wild around it, and the doorway was deep in shadows. When I tried the doorbell on Monday, it seemed to be broken.

"What's your shoe size?"

This was the Professor's first question, once I had announced myself as the new housekeeper. No bow, no greeting. If there is one ironclad rule in my profession, it's that you always give the employer what he wants; and so I told him.

"Twenty-four centimeters."

"There's a sturdy number," he said. "It's the factorial of four." He folded his arms, closed his eyes, and was silent for a moment.

"What's a 'factorial'?" I asked at last. I felt I should try to find out a bit more, since it seemed to be connected to his interest in my shoe size.

"The product of all the natural numbers from one to four is twenty-four," he said, without opening his eyes. "What's your telephone number?"

He nodded, as if deeply impressed. "That's the total number of primes between one and one hundred million."

It wasn't immediately clear to me why my phone number was so interesting, but his enthusiasm seemed genuine. And he wasn't showing off; he struck me as straightforward and modest. It nearly convinced me that there was something special about my phone number, and that I was somehow special for having it.

Soon after I began working for the Professor, I realized that he talked about numbers whenever he was unsure of what to say or do. Numbers were also his way of reaching out to the world. They were safe, a source of comfort.

Every morning, during the entire time I worked for the Professor, we repeated this numerical q and a at the front door. To the Professor, whose memory lasted only eighty minutes, I was always a new housekeeper he was meeting for the first time, and so every morning he was appropriately shy and reserved. He would ask my shoe size or telephone number, or perhaps my zip code, the registration number on my bicycle, or the number of brushstrokes in the characters of my name; and whatever the number, he invariably found some significance in it. Talk of factorials and primes flowed effortlessly, seeming completely natural, never forced.

Later, even after I had learned the meanings of some of these terms, there was still something pleasant about our daily introductions at the door. I found it reassuring to be reminded that my telephone number had some significance (beyond its usual purpose), and the simple sound of the numbers helped me to start the day's work with a positive attitude.

He had once been an expert in number theory at a university. He was sixty-four, but he looked older and somewhat haggard, as though he did not eat properly. He was barely more than five feet tall, and his back was so badly hunched that he seemed even shorter. The wrinkles on his bony neck looked a little grimy, and his wispy, snow-white hair fell in all directions, half-concealing his plump, Buddhalike ears. His voice was feeble and his movements were slow. If you looked closely, though, you could see traces of a face that had once been handsome. There was something in the sharp line of his jaw and his deeply carved features that was still attractive.

Whether he was at home or going out-which he did very rarely-the Professor always wore a suit and tie. His closet held three suits, one for winter, one for summer, and one that could be worn in spring or fall, three neckties, six shirts, and an overcoat. He did not own a sweater or a pair of casual pants. From a housekeeper's point of view, it was the ideal closet.

I suspect that the Professor had no idea there were clothes other than suits. He had no interest in what people wore, and even less in his own appearance. For him it was enough to get up in the morning, open the closet, and put on whichever suit wasn't wrapped in plastic from the cleaners. All three suits were dark and well-worn, much like the Professor himself, and clung to him like a second skin.

But by far the most curious thing about the Professor's appearance was the fact that his suit was covered with innumerable scraps of notepaper, each one attached to him by a tiny binder clip. Every conceivable surface-the collar, cuffs, pockets, hems, belt loops, and buttonholes-was covered with notes, and the binder clips gathered the fabric of his clothing in awkward bunches. The notes were simply scraps of torn paper, some yellowing or crumbling. In order to read them, you had to get close and squint, but it soon became clear that he was compensating for his lack of memory by writing down the things he absolutely had to remember and pinning them where he couldn't lose them-on his body. His odd appearance was as distracting as his questions about my shoe size.

"Come in then," he said. "I have to work, but you just do whatever it is you have to do." And with that he disappeared into his study. As he turned and walked away, the notes made a dry, rustling sound.

From the bits and pieces of information I gleaned from the nine housekeepers who had come before me, it seemed that the old woman in the main house was a widow, and that her husband had been the Professor's older brother. When their parents had died, his brother had taken over the family textile business, had enlarged it considerably, and willingly assumed the cost of educating a brother who was a dozen years younger. In this way, the Professor had been able to pursue his study of mathematics at Cambridge University. But soon after he had received his doctorate and had found a position at a research institute, his brother had died suddenly of acute hepatitis. The widow, who had no children, decided to close down the factory, put up an apartment building on the land, and live off the rents she collected.

In the years that followed, the Professor and his sister-in-law had settled peacefully into their respective lives-until the accident. A truck driver had dozed off and struck the Professor's car head-on. He had suffered irreversible brain damage and had eventually lost his position at the university. He was forty-seven at the time, and since then he'd had no income except the prize money he earned from solving contest problems in the mathematics journals. For seventeen years he had been completely dependent on the widow's charity.

"You have to feel sorry for the old woman," one of the former housekeepers had said. "Having that strange brother-in-law eat through what her husband left her like some parasite." She'd been sent packing after she complained about the Professor's incessant jabbering about numbers.

The inside of the cottage was as cold and uninviting as the outside. There were just two rooms, an eat-in kitchen and a study that doubled as the Professor's bedroom. It was small, and the wretched condition of the place was striking. The furniture was cheap, the wallpaper was discolored, and the floor in the hall creaked miserably. The doorbell wasn't the only thing that didn't work: just about everything in the house was either broken or on its last legs. The little window in the bathroom was cracked, the knob on the kitchen door was falling off, and the radio that sat on top of the dish cupboard made no sound when I tried to turn it on.