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

"Do you think they'll win the pennant?" I had just tasted the soup and was checking the oven.

"I'm sure they will," the Professor said, sounding unusually certain. "Look up there," he pointed out the window. "They say it's good luck when there's a little nick out of the bottom edge of the evening star. That means they'll win today and take the pennant."

"What? That isn't true. You're just making it up."

"Up it ingmak just re'you."

No matter how much Root teased him, the Professor's iron kept its rhythm.

Root got down on the floor to clean places that were normally overlooked-the legs of the chairs and the underside of the table. And I went to the dish cupboard in search of a platter for the roast beef. When I looked out again, the garden was deep in shadow.

We were pleased with our work, and looking forward to the food, the presents, and the fun. But at the very last moment, just as we were about to take our places and begin the party, we discovered a little problem. The girl at the bakery had forgotten to put the candles in the box. The cake I'd ordered wasn't large enough to hold eleven candles, so I had asked her to put in one large candle and one small one; but when I pulled the box out of the refrigerator, they were not there.

"We can't have a birthday cake without candles. You don't get your wish if you don't blow them out!" The Professor seemed more upset than the birthday boy himself.

"I'll run back to the bakery and get them," I said, taking off my apron. But Root stopped me before I could get to the door.

"No, I'll go. I'm faster, anyway." And before the words were out of his mouth, he was gone.

The bakery wasn't far away and there was still some daylight left. I closed the cake box and put it back in the refrigerator; then we sat down at the table and waited for Root to return.

The tablecloth looked beautiful. The wrinkles had vanished completely, and its delicate lace pattern had transformed the kitchen. The only decoration was a yogurt bottle with some wildflowers I had plucked from the garden, but they brightened up the cottage nicely. The knives and forks and spoons didn't match, but they were neatly laid out on the table, and if you scrunched up your eyes the general effect was magnificent.

By comparison, the food was rather plain. I had made shrimp cocktail, roast beef and mashed potatoes, spinach and bacon salad, pea soup, and fruit punch-all Root's favorites-and, for the Professor, no carrots. There were no special sauces or elaborate preparations, it was just simple food. But it did smell good.

I smiled at the Professor and he smiled at me; we were both a bit lost with nothing to do. He coughed, tugged at the collar of his jacket, and squirmed in his chair, anxious for the party to begin.

There was an empty place on the table, just in front of Root's chair-the space I'd saved for the cake. Our eyes fell on it at the same moment.

"Does it seem like he's taking a long time?" the Professor murmured, a hint of hesitation in his voice.

"No, I don't think so," I said, surprised to hear him mention the time and see him look at the clock. "It hasn't been ten minutes yet."

"Is that right?"

I turned on the radio to distract him.

"How long has it been now?"

"Twelve minutes."

"Doesn't that seem long?"

"Don't worry. It's fine."

I wondered how many times I had said those words since I'd come to work at the Professor's house. "Don't worry. It's fine." At the barber, outside the X-ray room at the clinic, on the bus home from the ball game. Sometimes as I was rubbing his back, at other times stroking his hand. But I wondered whether I had ever been able to comfort him. His real pain was somewhere else, and I sensed that I was always missing the spot.

"He'll be back soon. Don't worry." This was all I could offer him.

As it grew darker outside, the Professor's anxiety deepened. Every thirty seconds or so he would pull at his collar and glance at the clock. He was so agitated he didn't seem to notice the notes falling from his chest with each tug.

There were cheers from the radio. Paciorek had a base hit in the bottom of the first and the Tigers had scored.

"How long has it been now?" he asked again. "Something must have happened to him. It's taking too long." The legs of his chair scraped on the floor as he twisted this way and that.

"Okay. I'll go look for him. But you mustn't worry. I'm sure he's fine." I got up and put my hand on his shoulder.

I found Root near the row of shops by the station. The Professor was right, there was a problem. The bakery had been closed. But Root, resourceful as ever, had already come up with a solution. He had found another bakery on the other side of the station, and when he explained the situation they had given him some candles. We turned around and ran straight home to the Professor's.

When we got there, we realized almost immediately that something was wrong. The flowers were as fresh as ever, the Tigers were still leading Yakult, and the food was still laid out for the party, but there had been an accident. In the time it had taken to find two candles, the table had been ruined. The birthday cake lay in a lump in front of Root's place, the very spot where the Professor and I had been staring just a moment ago.

The Professor stood next to the table, still holding the empty cake box. The darkness at his back seemed about to engulf him.

"I thought I'd get it ready. So we could eat it right away," he mumbled without looking up, as if apologizing to the empty box. "I'm so sorry. I don't know what to say. It's ruined…"

We sat him down and did what we could to comfort him. Root took the box from him and tossed it on a chair, as though it hadn't held anything so very important. I turned down the radio and turned on the lights.

"It's not really ruined," I told him. "It'll be fine. Nothing to get upset about."

In a businesslike manner, I set about repairing the damage. The trick was to get everything back to normal as quickly as possible, without giving the Professor time to think.

The cake had fallen from the box, crushing one side. The other half, however, was more or less intact, with most of the chocolate-frosting message still legible: The Professor & Root, Congr- I cut it in three pieces and used a knife to fix the whipped cream. Then I gathered up the scattered strawberries, jelly bunnies, and sugar angels and spread them around as evenly as I could. Finally, I put the candles in Root's piece. "Look!" I announced at last. "Good as new!"

Root peered into the Professor's eyes. "And it'll taste just as good," he said.

"No harm done," I chimed in. But the Professor sat there in silence.

To be honest, I was more worried about the tablecloth than the cake. No matter how much I'd wiped, there were still crumbs and smudges of whipped cream down in the eyelets of the lace. All my scrubbing had only succeeded in filling the room with a sickly sweet smell; but the intricate design of the material had been completely spoiled.

I hid the stain under the platter of roast beef, warmed the soup, and found a match to light the candles. The announcer on the radio said that Yakult had come from behind in the third and was leading the Tigers. Root had the Enatsu card, decorated with a yellow ribbon, hidden in his pocket.

"There, look. Everything's set. Here, Professor, have a seat." As I took him by the hand, he looked up at last and noticed Root standing beside him.

"How old are you?" he murmured. "And what was your name again… your head, it's just like the square root sign… We can come to know an infinite range of numbers with this one little sign, even those we can't see…" Then the Professor reached across the table and rubbed Root's head.

On June 24, 1993, there was an article in the newspaper about Andrew Wiles, an Englishman teaching at Princeton University. He had proven Fermat's Last Theorem. There were two large pictures stretching across the page, one a photograph of Wiles, a casually dressed man with curly, receding hair, and the other an engraving of Pierre de Fermat, in a flowing seventeenth-century academic gown. In their own funny way, the two pictures told the story of how long it had taken to solve Fermat's riddle. The article praised Wiles's solution as a triumph of the human intellect and a quantum leap in the field. It also noted that Wiles had built on an idea that had been developed by two Japanese mathematicians, Yutaka Taniyama and Goro Shimura, a proposition known as the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture.