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

He turned toward me. A loud clap of thunder shook the room, and the light in the main house blinked off for a moment. I gripped the sleeve of his jacket.

"Don't worry," he said, reaching over to stroke my hand. "The square root sign is a sturdy one. It shelters all the numbers."

Needless to say, Root came home safe and sound when his camping trip was over. He brought the Professor a little figurine of a sleeping rabbit he had made from twigs and acorns. The Professor set it on his desk, and at its feet he attached a note: "A present from (the housekeeper's son)."

I asked Root whether the storm on the first day of his trip had caused problems, but he said they hadn't had a drop of rain. In the end, the only damage from the lightning had been done to a gingko tree at a shrine near the Professor's house.

The heat returned, and with it the buzzing of the cicadas. The curtains and the floor were dry by the next day.

Root's attention turned to the Tigers. He had apparently hoped they would be in first place by the time he got back; but things had not gone his way and they had fallen back to fourth after losing to the first-place Swallows.

"Did you cheer for them while I was gone?"

"Of course we did," said the Professor. Root seemed to suspect that his team's problems had been caused by the Professor's negligence.

"But you don't even know how to turn on the radio."

"Your mother showed me."

"Really?"

"Really. She even tuned in the game for me."

"But they don't win if you just sit there and listen."

"I know, and I truly did cheer for them. I talked to the radio the whole time. I prayed Enatsu would strike out the side every inning." The Professor did everything he could to placate Root.

Soon, we were back to our evenings in the kitchen listening to the radio. The receiver, which was perched on top of the dish cupboard, had worked very well since the Professor had it repaired; and the terrible static that occasionally drowned out the game was due to the poor location of the cottage rather than to the radio itself.

We kept the volume low until the game came on, so low you could barely hear it over the everyday sounds-my puttering in the kitchen before dinner, the motorbikes on the street outside, the Professor muttering to himself, or Root's occasional sneeze. Only when we all fell silent could we hear the music, which always seemed to be some nameless old song.

The Professor was reading in his easy chair near the window. Root was fidgeting at the table, working on something in his notebook. The previous title on the notebook-"Cubic forms with whole-number coefficients, No. 11"-had been scratched out and replaced with "Tiger Notes" in Root's handwriting. The Professor had given him a notebook he no longer needed to record data on the team. The first three pages were filled with incomprehensible equations and the later ones with other esoteric bits of information, such as Nakada's ERA or Shinjo's batting average.

I was kneading bread dough in the kitchen. We had decided to have fresh bread, something we hadn't had in a long while; topped with cheese or ham or vegetables, it would be our dinner. The sun had set, but the air was stifling, as though the leaves on the trees were breathing back the heat they had absorbed from the long, hot day. A warm blast of air blew in through the windows. The flowers on the morning glory Root had brought home from school had closed up for the night, and cicadas were resting on the trunk of the tallest tree in the garden, a grand old paulownia.

The fresh dough was soft and supple. The counter and floor were white with flour, as was my brow where I'd wiped the sweat with my sleeve.

"Professor?" said Root, his pencil poised above the page. Due to the heat, he wore a sleeveless T-shirt and a pair of shorts. He was just back from the pool and his hair was still wet.

"Yes?" said the Professor, looking up. His reading glasses had slipped to the end of his nose.

"What does 'Total Bases' mean?"

"It's the number of bases a player earns from a hit. So you'd score one for a single, two for a double, three for a triple, and…"

"Four for a home run."

"Right!" The Professor was delighted by Root's enthusiasm.

"You shouldn't bother the Professor when he's working," I said, dividing the dough into pieces and rounding them into little balls.

"I know," said Root.

The sky was clear, without a wisp of cloud. Sunlight filtered through the brilliant green leaves of the paulownia tree, dappling the ground in the garden. Root counted out the bases on his fingers as I lit the oven. Static crackled through the music on the radio and then faded again.

"But what about-" Root spoke up again.

"What about what?" I interrupted.

"I'm not asking you," he said. "Professor, how do you calculate 'Regulation at Bats'?"

"You multiply the number of games by 3.1, and discard everything after the decimal point."

"So you round down for.4 and up for.5?" Root asked.

"That's right. Let me have a look." He closed his book and went over to where Root was working. The notes on his jacket made a low, rustling sound. He rested one hand on the table and the other on Root's shoulder. Their shadows merged, with Root's legs swinging back and forth under the chair. I put the little loaves in the oven.

Soon, the music on the radio announced the start of the game. Root turned up the volume.

"Got to win today… got to win today… got to win today." It was his daily incantation.

"Do you suppose Enatsu will be starting?" the Professor said, taking off his glasses.

As we listened, I remembered the pristine pitcher's mound at the center of the infield, neatly rounded into a cool, damp, black mass awaiting the start of the game.

"Pitching today for the Tigers…"

Cheers and static drowned out the voice of the announcer. The smell of baking bread filled the room as we pictured the trail left by the pitcher's cleats on his walk out to the mound.

One day toward the end of summer vacation, I noticed that the Professor's jaw was badly swollen. It was just as the Tigers were returning from a successful road trip on which they'd managed to go 10 and 6, vaulting into second place just two and a half games behind the division-leading Yakult.

The Professor had apparently been hiding his problem from me and had not said a word about the pain. If he had given himself one-tenth of the attention that he paid to Root, this sort of thing would never have happened; but by the time I noticed, the left side of his face was so swollen that he could barely open his mouth.

Getting him to the dentist proved easier than our trips to the barber or the baseball game. The pain had taken the fight out of him, and his stiff jaw prevented him from making the usual objections. He changed his shirt, put on his shoes, and followed me out the door. I held a parasol to protect him from the sun, and he huddled underneath, as though hiding from the pain.

"You have to wait for me, you know," he mumbled as we sat down in the waiting room. Then, unsure as to whether I'd understood or whether he could trust me, he repeated himself every few minutes while we waited.

"You can't go out for a walk while I'm in there. You have to sit right here and wait for me. Do you understand?"

"Of course. I'm not about to leave you."

I rubbed his back, hoping to ease the pain a little. The other patients stared at the floor, as embarrassed as I was. But I knew from experience what to do in this situation. You simply had to be resolute, like the Pythagorean theorem or Euler's formula, and to keep the Professor happy.

"Really?" said the Professor.