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

"Of course. Don't worry. I'll be right here waiting for you, no matter how long it takes."

I knew it was impossible to reassure him, but I repeated myself anyway. As the door to the examination room closed behind him, he turned around as if checking that I'd keep my promise.

The treatment took longer than expected. A number of people who had been called in after the Professor had already settled their bills and gone home, and still he had not reappeared. He rarely brushed his teeth and did little to care for his dentures, and I doubted he was a particularly cooperative patient, so the dentist probably had his hands full. I got up from time to time to try to peer through the receptionist's window, but I could only see the back of the Professor's head.

When he finally emerged from the examination room, his mood was even worse than before. He looked exhausted, and his face was bathed in sweat. His mouth, still numb from the anesthesia, was pinched into an annoyed pout, and he sniffled constantly.

"Are you all right? You must be tired," I said. I stood up and held out my hand to him, but he brushed me aside and walked away without a look.

I called after him, but it was as if he hadn't heard me. He shuffled out of the office slippers, pushed on his shoes, and walked out the door. I paid the bill as quickly as I could and chased after him down the street.

He was reaching a busy intersection when I finally caught up with him. He seemed to know the way home, but he had charged out into the street, oblivious to the traffic and the signals. I was surprised to see how quickly he could walk.

"Wait!" I called out to slow him down, but this only succeeded in drawing wary looks from the people nearby. The heat and glare of the summer sun were dizzying.

I was starting to get angry. He had no reason to be so rude to me. It was hardly my fault that it had been so painful; and it would have been far worse had we ignored it. Even Root was braver than this at the dentist… Of course! That was it! I should have brought Root along. The Professor would have felt compelled to behave more like an adult with a child present. To treat me like this, after I'd kept my promise and waited for him the whole time…

I knew it was cruel, but I had half a mind to let him go off on his own. I slowed my pace and he charged ahead, apparently determined to get home as soon as possible, ignoring the oncoming traffic. His hair was wild, and his suit was rumpled. He looked smaller than usual as his tiny, receding figure disappeared in the evening shadows. The notes on his jacket, catching a glint of sunlight, helped to keep him in sight. They blinked like coded messages, signaling the Professor's whereabouts.

Suddenly, my hand tightened around the handle of my parasol and I checked my watch. I calculated the time from the moment the Professor left the waiting room until he returned. Ten minutes, twenty, thirty… I ticked off the intervals. Something was wrong.

I ran after him, shuffling to keep my sandals on my feet, my eyes fixed on the bright scraps of paper clipped to his suit as they disappeared around the corner into the shadows of the city.

While the Professor was taking a bath, I tried to straighten up his issues of the Journal of Mathematics. He seemed to live for the puzzle problems it published, but he didn't pay much attention to the rest of magazine and left the barely opened copies strewn around his study. I gathered up all the issues and arranged them in chronological order; then I checked the tables of contents and pulled out the ones in which the Professor was mentioned for having won a prize. That still left quite a few issues. The names of prizewinners were printed in bold type and boxed in a fancy border, so they were easy to spot. The Professor's name seemed especially grand to me, printed there in magazine after magazine; and the proofs themselves, though they lost the familiarity they had in the Professor's own handwriting, seemed all the more impressive in print, the force of their incomprehensible arguments all the more powerful, even to me.

The study was hotter than the rest of the house, perhaps because it had been closed up and silent for so long. As I packed away the issues of the journal that did not mention the Professor, I thought about the dentist's office and I calculated the time again. With the Professor, you always had to keep in mind his eighty-minute memory. Still, no matter how many times I added it up, we'd been apart less than an hour.

I told myself that the Professor was only human, and even though he was a brilliant mathematician, there was no reason why the eighty-minute cycle should be entirely reliable. Circumstances change from day to day, and the people who are subject to them change as well. The Professor had been in pain, and strangers were poking around in his mouth; perhaps this had thrown off his inner clock.

The stack of magazines containing the Professor's work was as high as my waist. How precious they were to me, these proofs he had devised, studded like jewels in an otherwise featureless journal. I straightened the pile. Here was the embodiment of the Professor's labors, and the concrete proof that his abilities had not been lost in that terrible accident.

"What are you doing?" He had finished his bath and was back in the study. His lips were still slack from the Novocain, but his jaw was less swollen. He seemed more cheerful, too, as if the pain had eased. I glanced quickly at the clock on the wall; he had been in the bath for less than thirty minutes.

"I'm straightening up the magazines," I said.

"Well, thank you, I appreciate it. But I don't think I really need to keep them. It's a lot to ask, but would you mind throwing them out?"

"I'm afraid I can't do that."

"Why not?"

"Because they're full of your work," I said, "the wonderful things you've accomplished."

He gave me a hesitant look but said nothing. The water dripping from his hair made blotches on his notes.

The cicadas that had been crying all morning suddenly fell silent. The garden baked under the blinding glare of the summer sun. If you looked carefully, you could see a line of thin clouds beyond the mountains at the horizon, clouds that seemed to announce the coming of autumn. They were just at the spot where the evening star would rise.

Not long after Root started school again, a letter arrived from the Journal of Mathematics. The Professor's proof, which he had worked on all summer, had won first prize.

The Professor, of course, showed no sign of pleasure. He barely looked at the letter before tossing it on the table without a word or a smile.

"It's the largest prize in the history of the Janaruobu ," I pointed out. Afraid I would mangle the pronunciation of the long foreign title, I had taken to calling it simply the Janaruobu .

The Professor gave a bored sigh.

"Do you know how hard you worked on that proof? You barely ate or slept for weeks. You literally sweated out the answer-and there are salt rings on your suit to prove it." Knowing he had forgotten all this, I wanted at least to remind him of his efforts. "Well, I remember how hard you worked," I said. "And how heavy the proof was when you gave it to me to mail, and how proud I was when I got to the window at the post office."

"Is that so?"

No matter what I said, he barely responded.

Perhaps all mathematicians underestimated the importance of their accomplishments. Or perhaps this was just the Professor's nature. Surely there must be ambitious mathematicians who wanted to be known for the advancements they made in their field. But none of that seemed to matter to the Professor. He was completely indifferent to a problem as soon as he had solved it. Once the object of his attention had yielded, showing its true form, the Professor lost interest. He simply walked away in search of the next challenge.