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

"You should have some, too," he said.

"No, thanks. You go ahead."

He crushed the flesh of the melon with the back of his fork and began to eat, spraying juice on the table.

With Root at camp, there was no one to turn on the radio, the house was quiet. There was no sign of life from the widow's house, either. A single cicada cried for a moment and then fell silent.

"Have a little," he said, holding out the last slice.

"No, thanks. You eat it," I said, wiping his mouth with my handkerchief. "It was hot again today."

"Scorching," he said.

"Don't forget to use the medicine for your heat rash. It's in the bathroom."

"I'll try to remember," he said.

"They say it'll be even hotter tomorrow."

"That's how we spend the summer," he said, "complaining about the heat."

The trees suddenly began to tremble and the sky grew dark. The line of hills on the horizon, faintly visible just a moment before, disappeared in the gloom. There was a rumbling in the distance.

"Thunder!" we said together, as the rain began to fall in enormous drops. The pounding on the roof echoed through the room. I stood up to close the windows, but the Professor stopped me.

"Leave them," he said. "It feels good to have them open."

The curtains billowed in the breeze, letting the rain pour in on our bare feet. It was cool and refreshing, just as the Professor had said. The sun had vanished and the only light in the garden was the faint glow from the lamp above the kitchen sink. Small birds flitted among the drooping, tangled branches of the trees, and then the rain obscured everything. The smell of fresh garden soil filled the air as the thunder drew closer.

I was thinking about Root. Would he find the raincoat I'd packed? And should I have made him take an extra pair of sneakers? I hoped he was eating properly, and that he wouldn't go to bed with wet hair and catch a cold.

"Do you suppose it's raining in the mountains?" I said.

"It's too dark to see," said the Professor, squinting off at the horizon. "I suppose I'll need to get my prescription changed soon."

"Is the lightning over the mountains?" I said.

"Why are you so concerned about the mountains?"

"My son's camping there."

"Your son?"

"Yes. He's ten. He likes baseball and he's a bit of a handful. You nicknamed him Root, because his head is flat on top."

"Is that so, you have a son? That's fine," he said. As soon as Root was mentioned, the Professor cheered up, as usual. "It's a grand thing for a child to go camping in the summer. What could be better for him?"

The Professor leaned back and stretched. His breath smelled faintly of melon. A streak of lightning flashed across the sky, and the thunder rumbled louder than ever. The darkness and heavy rain could not obscure the lightning, and even after a burst had faded, it remained etched on my retina.

"I'm sure that one hit the ground," I said. The Professor grunted but did not answer. The rain splashed over the floor. As I rolled up his cuffs so they wouldn't get wet, his legs twitched as though I were tickling him.

"Lightning tends to strike high places, so the mountains are more dangerous than down here," he said. As a mathematician- a scientist-I thought he would have known more than I did about lightning, but I was wrong. "And the evening star was hazy this evening, which usually means the weather is taking a turn for the worse." There was none of the Professor's usual logic in his pronouncements on the weather.

As he spoke, the rain fell hard. The lightning flashed, the thunder rattled the windowpanes.

"I'm worried about Root," I said.

"Someone once wrote that worrying is the hardest thing about being a parent."

"His clothes are probably soaked, and he's there for four more days. He'll be miserable."

"It's just a shower. When the sun comes out tomorrow and it warms up, everything will dry out."

"But what if he gets struck by lightning?"

"The odds are very low," he said.

"But if he does? What if lightning strikes his Tigers cap? It's flat and shaped like the square root sign; it could attract lightning."

"Pointy heads are more dangerous," he said. "They're like lightning rods."

The Professor was usually the one to worry about Root, but this time he was determined to comfort me. A gust of wind twisted the trees, but as the storm raged on, the cottage seemed to settle into silence. There was a light in a window on the second floor of the widow's house.

"I feel empty when Root isn't here," I said.

I hadn't really been speaking to him, but the Professor murmured in reply, "So, you're saying that there's a zero in you?"

"I suppose that's what I mean," I said, nodding weakly.

"The person who discovered zero must have been remarkable, don't you think?"

"Hasn't zero been around forever?"

"How long is forever?"

"I don't know. For as long as people have been around-wasn't there always a zero?"

"So you think that zero was there waiting for us when humans came into being, like the flowers and the stars? You should have more respect for human progress. We made the zero, through great pain and struggle."

He sat up in his chair and scratched his head, looking utterly disheveled.

"So who was it? Who discovered zero?"

"An Indian mathematician; we don't know his name. The ancient Greeks thought there was no need to count something that was nothing. And since it was nothing, they held that it was impossible to express it as a figure. So someone had to overcome this reasonable assumption, someone had to figure out how to express nothing as a number. This unknown man from India made nonexistence exist. Extraordinary, don't you think?"

"Yes," I agreed, though I wasn't sure how this Indian mathematician would calm my worries about Root. Still, I had learned from experience that anything the Professor was passionate about was bound to be worthwhile. "So, a great Indian teacher of mathematics discovered the zero written in God's notebook, and, thanks to him, we can now read many more pages in the notebook. Is that it?"

"That's it exactly." He laughed. He took a pencil and notepaper from his pocket, as I'd seen him do a thousand times. The gesture was always refined. "Take a look at this," he said. "It's thanks to zero that we can tell these two numbers apart." Using the arm of the chair to write on, he scribbled down the numbers 38 and 308. Then he drew two thick lines under the zero. "Thirty-eight is made up of three 10s and eight 1s; 308 is three 100s, no 10s, and eight 1s. The tens place is empty, and it's the 0 that tells us that. Do you see?"

"I do."

"So, let's pretend there's a ruler here, a wooden ruler thirty centimeters long. What would be the mark all the way at the left here?"

"That would be zero."

"That's right. So zero would be on the far left. A ruler begins at zero. All you have to do is line up the edge of what you want to measure with the zero, and the ruler does the rest. If you started with 1, it wouldn't work. So it's zero that allows us to use a ruler, too."

The rain continued. A siren wailed somewhere; the thunder drowned it out.

"But the most marvelous thing about zero is not that it's a sign or a measurement, but that it's a real number all by itself. It's the number that's one less than 1, the smallest of the natural numbers. Despite what the Greeks might have thought, zero doesn't disturb the rules of calculation; on the contrary, it brings greater order to them. Try imagining one little bird sitting on a branch, singing in a clear, high voice. He has a pretty little beak and colorful feathers. You stare at him, enchanted; but as soon as you breathe, he flies away, leaving only the bare branch, and a few dried leaves fluttering in the breeze." The Professor pointed out at the dark garden, as if the bird had really just flown away. The shadows seemed deeper and longer in the rain. "Yes, 1 – 1 = 0. A lovely equation, don't you think?"