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

In my line of work, you get used to saying good-bye to employers, and all the more so when you work for an agency like the Akebono. The clients' needs change constantly, and you almost never find a truly ideal fit between housekeeper and household. What's more, the longer you stay in the same job, the greater the potential for conflict.

A few of my previous employers had been kind enough to give me a going-away party when I left, and I'd been quite tearful once or twice when a child had brought me a good-bye present. But just as frequently a job would end without so much as a parting word, and sometimes I would even receive a bill for damage I had allegedly done to dishes, furniture, or clothing.

However a job ends, I had always tried to take it in my stride. There was nothing personal about it, no cause to feel sad or wounded. To them, I was just one more housekeeper in a long line, not someone to be remembered after I was gone. I usually forgot them, too, as soon as I was out the door. And by the next day, I was too busy learning the rules and expectations for my new job to have time to feel sentimental.

With the Professor, however, things were different. And to be honest, what bothered me most was knowing that he would have no memory that we had ever been there. He could never ask his sister-in-law why I had quit or what had become of Root; and he would never remember us as he sat watching the evening star from his easy chair, or when he paused in the middle of a math problem. It was painful to think about. I was sad, but also angry with myself for having broken something that could never be fixed.

My new job was mindless but physically demanding (washing five fancy imported cars, mopping all the staircases in a four-story building, making dinner for ten), but I still found it difficult to concentrate, since one corner of my brain was always occupied with thoughts of the Professor. And I invariably pictured him as I'd seen him during his illness, sitting on the edge of the bed, bent almost double. Preoccupied as I was with this thought, I made a number of minor mistakes at work, and I was constantly in trouble with the lady of the house.

I didn't know who had taken my place at the Professor's. I hoped it was someone who looked enough like me to match the portrait on the Professor's suit. Was he asking her telephone number or shoe size and then expounding on the mysteries hidden in them? I have to admit that I didn't like to imagine him sharing his secrets with my successor. When I thought about it, the pleasures of our shared mathematical discoveries seemed to fade-though I knew from the Professor that the numbers themselves went on just as they always had, regardless of changes in the world.

Sometimes I imagined that the new housekeeper would be completely overwhelmed by the challenge of working for the Professor, and that the Director would realize I was the only one for the job. But I forced myself to give up such daydreams. It was vain to assume that he couldn't get along without me; the Director had been right, there were plenty of other housekeepers for the job.

Root would often ask why we weren't going to the Professor's anymore.

"The situation changed," I told him.

"What situation?"

"It's complicated." He shrugged, but I could sense his disapproval.

A week after I left the Professor's, the Tigers' Yufune pitched a no-hitter against the Hiroshima Carp. Root and I skipped our baths and listened to the game on the radio after dinner. Mayumi had three RBIs and Shinjo hit a homer. It was 6-0 in the bottom of the eighth-same score as the Nakagomi game. When the Carp went down in order, the noise in the ballpark and the announcer's tone seemed to ratchet up a notch, but Root and I grew quiet. The first Hiroshima batter in the ninth grounded out to second. Root sighed. Each of us knew what the other was thinking, the memories that this stirred up. No need to say anything.

Then Shoda, the last batter, made contact, he popped it up into the outfield, the roar of the crowd drowned out the announcer, and when he finally broke through again, he was still yelling "Out! Out! Out!" over and over again.

"He did it." Root's tone was subdued. I nodded.

"This is the fifty-eighth no-hitter… in major league history." The announcer was coming through fitfully. "And the first for the Tigers… in nineteen years, since Enatsu in 1973."

We weren't sure whether we were happy or not about Yufune's achievement. The Tigers had won, and it was a great feat to pitch a no-hitter. But somehow the achievement had left us depressed. The excitement pouring from the radio had brought back the game on June 2, and along with it the realization that the Professor, who had sat so happily in seat 714, was far away from us now. And I couldn't help feeling that the foul ball off the bat of that nameless pinch hitter in the ninth, the ball that had nearly hit Root, had been an ill omen.

"Okay, time for bed. You have school in the morning," I said. Root grunted and turned off the radio.

The foul ball foretold the end of Nakagomi's no-hitter. But more bad luck had followed close behind with the Professor's fever and then my dismissal. Of course, there was no way to know if it was all due to the curse of the foul, but to me it certainly felt that way-at that moment, everything had turned for the worse.

One day, at the bus stop on my way to work, a strange woman tricked me out of some money. She wasn't a pickpocket or a purse-snatcher. I willingly gave her the money, so I couldn't go to the police; if she was practicing some new sort of swindle, then it certainly was an effective one. She marched straight up to me, held out her hand, and without any preamble said just one word: "Money." She was a large, pale woman in her late thirties, and other than the fact that she was wearing a spring coat in summer, there was nothing odd about her appearance. She was too neatly dressed to be a vagrant, nor did she seem to be deranged. Her manner was as calm as if she were simply asking directions-in fact she behaved as though I had asked for directions from her .

"Money," she said again.

I took out a bill and laid it on her palm. I have no idea why I did it. Why would someone as poor as I am give money to a stranger, short of being threatened at gunpoint? But I did, and having slipped the bill into her pocket, she walked off as grandly as she'd come, just as the bus pulled up to the stop.

All the way to the tax consultants' house, I tried to imagine what my money would mean to this woman. Would it feed her hungry children? Or buy medicine for her ailing parents? Or was it just enough to keep her from going crazy, committing suicide and taking her whole family with her? But no matter how much I tried to convince myself that she really needed it, I couldn't get over my anger at what had happened. It wasn't the loss of the money that upset me; it was the miserable feeling that somehow I was the one who had received some sort of handout, not the other way around.

A few days later, Root and I went to tend my mother's grave on the anniversary of her death. In the thicket behind the gravestone, we discovered a dead fawn. The body was quite decayed, but strips of spotted fur clung to its back. Its legs were splayed out under it, as if it had struggled to stand up right to the end. The organs had liquefied, the eyes were black holes, its jaw was slightly parted, revealing little teeth.

Root found it. He gave a stifled cry, but then stood there frozen, no more able to open his mouth and call me than to look away.

It had probably come running down the mountain and crashed into the stone, dying on the spot. When we looked closer, we could see traces of blood and skin on the grave.

"What should we do?" Root asked.

"It's okay," I told him. "We should just leave it."