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

As I got into bed, I finally glanced at the clock. It had been much more than eighty minutes since we'd had our talk about amicable numbers. By now he'd have forgotten all about our secret, and he'd have no idea where the number 220 had come from. I found it difficult to fall asleep.

From a housekeeper's perspective, working for the Professor was relatively easy: a small house, no visitors or phone calls, and only light meals for one man who had little interest in food. At other jobs, I always had to do as much as possible in a short amount of time; but now I was delighted to have so much time to do a truly thorough job of cleaning, washing, and cooking. I learned to recognize when the Professor was beginning a new contest, and how to avoid disturbing him. I polished the kitchen table to my heart's content with a special varnish and patched the mattress on his bed. I even invented various ways to camouflage the carrots in his dinner.

The one thing about the job that was always a little tricky was understanding how the Professor's memory worked. According to the old woman, he remembered nothing after 1975; but I had no idea what yesterday meant to him or whether he could think ahead to tomorrow, or how much he suffered.

It was clear that he didn't remember me from one day to the next. The note clipped to his sleeve simply informed him that it was not our first meeting, but it could not bring back the memory of the time we had spent together.

When I went out shopping, I tried to return home within an hour and twenty minutes. As befit a mathematician, the device in his brain that measured those eighty minutes was more precise than any clock. If an hour and eighteen minutes had passed from the time I walked out the door to the time I got back, I would receive a friendly welcome; but after an hour and twenty-two minutes, we were back to "What's your shoe size?"

I was always afraid of making some careless remark that might upset him. I nearly bit my tongue once when I started to mention something the newspaper had said about Prime Minister Miyazawa. (For the Professor, the prime minister was still Takeo Miki.) And I felt awful about suggesting that we get a television to watch the summer Olympics in Barcelona. (His last Olympics were in Munich.) Still, the Professor gave no sign that this bothered him. When the conversation veered off in a direction he couldn't follow, he simply waited patiently until it returned to a topic he could handle. But, for his part, he never asked me anything about myself, how long I'd been working as a housekeeper, where I came from, or whether I had a family. Perhaps he was afraid of bothering me by repeating the same question again and again.

The one topic we could discuss without any worry was mathematics. Not that I was enthusiastic about it at first. In school, I had hated math so much that the mere sight of the textbook made me feel ill. But the things the Professor taught me seemed to find their way effortlessly into my brain-not because I was an employee anxious to please her employer but because he was a such a gifted teacher. There was something profound in his love for math. And it helped that he forgot what he'd taught me before, so I was free to repeat the same question until I understood. Things that most people would get the first time around might take me five, or even ten times, but I could go on asking the Professor to explain until I finally got it.

"The person who discovered amicable numbers must have been a genius."

"You might say that: it was Pythagoras, in the sixth century B.C."

"Did they have numbers that long ago?"

"Of course! Did you think they were invented in the nineteenth century? There were numbers before human beings- before the world itself was formed."

We talked about numbers while I worked in the kitchen. The Professor would sit at the kitchen table or relax in the easy chair by the window, while I stirred something on the stove or washed the dishes at the sink.

"Is that so? I'd always thought that human beings invented numbers."

"No, not at all. If that were the case, they wouldn't be so difficult to understand and there'd be no need for mathematicians. No one actually witnessed the first numbers come into being-when we first became aware of them, they'd already been around for a long time."

"And that's why so many smart people try so hard to figure out how they work?"

"Yes, and why human beings seem so foolish and frail compared to whoever or whatever created these numbers." The Professor sat back in his chair and opened one of his journals.

"Well, hunger makes you even more foolish and frail, so we need to feed that brain of yours. Dinner will be ready in a minute." Having finished grating some carrots to mix into his hamburger, I carefully slipped the peelings into the garbage pail. "By the way," I added, "I've been trying to find another pair of amicable numbers besides 220 and 284, but I haven't had any luck."

"The next smallest pair is 1,184 and 1,210."

"Four digits? No wonder I didn't find them. I even had my son help me. I found the factors, and then he added them up."

"You have a son?" The Professor sat up in his chair; his magazine slipped to the floor.

"Yes."

"How old is he?"

"Ten."

"Ten? He's just a little boy!" The Professor's expression had quickly darkened, he was becoming agitated. I stopped mixing the hamburger and waited for what I was sure was coming: a lesson on the significance of the number 10.

"And where is your son now?" he said.

"Well, let's see. He's home from school by now, but he's probably given up on his homework and gone to the park to play baseball with his friends."

" 'Well, let's see'! How can you be so nonchalant? It'll be dark soon!"

I was wrong, there would be no revelations about the number 10, it seemed. In this case, 10 was the age of a small boy, and nothing more.

"It's all right," I said. "He does this every day."

"Every day! You abandon your son every day so you can come here to make hamburgers?"

"I don't abandon him, and it's my job to come here." I wasn't sure why the Professor was so concerned about my son, but I went back to my recipe, adding some pepper and nutmeg.

"Who takes care of him when you're not home? Does your husband come home early from work? Does his grandmother watch him?"

"No, unfortunately there's no husband or grandmother. It's just the two of us."

"So he's at home all alone? He sits and waits for his mother in a dark house while you're here making dinner for a stranger? Making my dinner!"

No longer able to control himself, the Professor jumped up from his chair and began circling the table. The notes on his body trembled as he ran his hand nervously through his hair. Dandruff sprinkled on his shoulder. I turned off the soup just as it began to boil.

"You really don't need to worry," I said, trying to sound calm. "We've been doing this since he was much younger. Now that he's ten, he can manage for himself. He has the phone number here, and if he needs help, he knows to ask the landlord downstairs-"

"No, no, no!" The Professor cut me off as he paced around the table. "You should never leave a child alone. What if the heater fell over and started a fire? What if he choked on a candy? Who'd be there to help? Oh! I don't want to think about it. Go home right now! You should make dinner for your child. Go home!" He grabbed my arm and tried to pull me toward the door.

"I'll go," I said, "but I just have to make these hamburgers for you."

"Are you going to stand there frying hamburgers while your child could be dying in a fire? Now listen to me: beginning tomorrow you'll bring your son along with you. He can come straight here from school. He can do his homework, and be near his mother. And don't think you can fool me just because I'll forget by tomorrow."