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

The first two weeks were exhausting, since I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. The work wasn't physically demanding, and yet at the end of each day my muscles were stiff and my whole body felt heavy. It was always a struggle at each new assignment until I adapted to the rhythm of the work, but the adjustment was especially difficult with the Professor. In most cases, I figured out what sort of person I was dealing with from the things they told me to do, or not to do. I determined where to focus my efforts, how to avoid getting into trouble-how to read the demands of the job. But the Professor never gave me instruction of any kind, as though he did not mind what I did.

On that first day, it occurred to me that I should simply follow what the old woman had said, and start by fixing the Professor's lunch. I checked the refrigerator and the kitchen cupboards, but I found nothing edible except for a box of damp oatmeal and some macaroni and cheese that was four years past its expiration date.

I knocked at the study door. There was no answer, so I knocked again. Still no answer. I knew I shouldn't, but I opened the door and spoke to the Professor's back as he sat at his desk.

"I'm sorry to disturb you," I said.

He gave no sign of having heard me. Perhaps he's hard of hearing, or wearing earplugs, I thought. "What would you like for lunch?" I continued. "Are there… things you like or dislike? Do you have any food allergies?"

The study smelled of books. Half the windows were covered by bookshelves, and piles of books drifted up the walls. A bed with a worn-out mattress was pressed against one wall. There was a single notebook lying open on the desk, but no computer, and the Professor wasn't holding a pen or pencil. He simply stared at a fixed point off in space.

"If there's nothing particular you want, I'll just make something. But please don't hesitate if there's anything I can get for you."

I happened to glance at some of the notes pinned to his suit: "… the failure of the analytic method…," "… Hilbert's thirteenth…," "… the function of the elliptical curve…" Shuffled in among the fragments of obscure numbers and symbols and words was one scrap that even I could understand. From the stains and bent corners of the paper and the rusted edges of the binder clip, I could tell that this one had been attached to the Professor for a long time: "My memory lasts only eighty minutes," it read.

"I have nothing to say," he said, turning suddenly and speaking in a loud voice. "I'm thinking at the moment. Thinking. And to have my thoughts interrupted is like being strangled. Don't you know that barging in here when I'm with my numbers is as rude as interrupting someone in the bathroom?"

I bowed and apologized repeatedly, but I doubt he heard a word of what I said. He had already returned to his fixed point somewhere off in space.

To be shouted at like that on the first day could be a serious problem, and I worried that I might become the tenth star on his file card before I'd even started. I promised myself that I would never disturb him again while he was "thinking."

But the Professor was always thinking. When he came out of the study and sat at the table, when he was gargling in the bathroom, or even when he did his strange stretching exercises, he continued thinking. He ate whatever was set in front of him, mechanically shoveling the food in his mouth and swallowing almost without chewing. He had a distracted, unsteady way of walking. I managed to find the right moment to ask him about things I needed to know-where he kept the wash bucket or how to use the water heater. And I avoided making any unnecessary noise, even breathing too loudly, as I moved about that unfamiliar house, waiting for him to take even a short break from his thinking.

I made a cream stew for dinner, something with vegetables and protein that he could eat with just a spoon-and that he could eat without removing bones or shells. Perhaps it was because he'd lost his parents at such a young age, but he had less than perfect table manners. He never said a word of thanks before he started eating, and he spilled food with almost every bite. I even caught him cleaning his ears with his dirty napkin at the table. He did not complain about my cooking, and he remained silent as he ate. Each time he plunged the spoon into the stew, he looked as if he might lose it in the bowl.

"Would you like some more? I've made plenty." It was careless of me to speak up suddenly like that, to take such a familiar tone, and all I got by way of an answer was a burp. Without so much as a glance in my direction, he got up and disappeared into his study. There was a small pile of carrots at the bottom of his bowl.

At the end of my first day, I noticed a new note on the cuff of his jacket. "The new housekeeper," it said. The words were written in tiny, delicate characters, and above them was a sketch of a woman's face. It looked like the work of a small child-short hair, round cheeks, and a mole next to the mouth-but I knew instantly that it was a portrait of me. I imagined the Professor hurrying to draw this likeness before the memory had vanished. The note was proof of something, that he had interrupted his thinking for my sake.

Over the next few days, I introduced myself by pointing to the note on his cuff. The Professor would be silent for a moment, comparing my face with the picture on his sleeve, trying to recall what the note had meant. At last he would make a little huffing sound and ask me my shoe size and telephone number. But I realized that something dramatic had changed when, at the end of my first week, he came to me with a bundle of papers covered with formulas and numbers, and asked me to send it off to the Journal of Mathematics .

"I'm terribly sorry to bother you, but…"

His tone was polite, and completely unexpected after the way he had scolded me in his study on my first day. It was the first request he had made of me, and he was no longer "thinking," for the moment.

"It's no trouble at all," I told him. I carefully copied the mysterious foreign address onto the envelope and ran off happily to the post office.

When I returned, the Professor wasn't thinking anymore. He was stretched out in the easy chair by the kitchen window, and as he rested I was finally able to clean the study. I opened the windows and took his quilt and pillow out into the garden to air. And then I ran the vacuum cleaner at full throttle. The room was cluttered and chaotic, but comfortable.

I was not surprised to find balls of hair and moldy Popsicle sticks behind the desk, or a chicken bone resting on top of one of his bookshelves. And yet, the room was filled by a kind of stillness. Not simply an absence of noise, but an accumulation of layers of silence, untouched by fallen hair or mold, silence that the Professor left behind as he wandered through the numbers, silence like a clear lake hidden in the depths of the forest.

But despite its relative comfort, if you had asked me whether it was an interesting room, I would have had to say no. There was not a single object to spark the imagination, no trinkets from the Professor's past, no mysterious photographs or decorations that might have amused a housekeeper.

I attacked the bookshelves with the duster. Group Theory.Algebraic Number Theory. Studies in Number Theory … Chevalley, Hamilton, Turing, Hardy, Baker… So many books and not one I wanted to read. Half of them were in foreign languages, and I couldn't even make out the titles on the spines. A few notebooks were stacked on the desk, along with a scattering of pencil stubs and binder clips. How could he think at such a characterless desk? The residue from an eraser was the only evidence of the work that he had done here.

As I wiped away the dust, arranged the notebooks, and gathered up the clips, it occurred to me that a mathematician ought to have some sort of expensive compass you couldn't find in an ordinary stationery shop, or an elaborate slide rule. The seat of the chair was worn down where the Professor sat.