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

He pulled off the tag that read "the new housekeeper" and fished a pencil from his pocket. Under the portrait, he added the words "and her son, ten years old."

I left that evening-or rather, I was chased out-without having time to wash my hands, let alone clean the kitchen properly. The Professor appeared even angrier than when I had interrupted his thinking. But his anger seemed to hide a deep fear, and I hurried home wondering what I would do if I found the apartment in flames.

Any reticence or wariness I felt for the Professor vanished the moment I saw him with my son, and from that point on I trusted him completely. As I'd promised the evening before, I gave my son a map to the house and told him to come directly from school. It was against agency rules to bring children to the workplace, but there was no denying the Professor.

When my son appeared at the door the next day with his schoolbag on his back, the Professor broke into a wide grin and opened his arms to embrace him. I didn't even have time to point at the line he'd added to his note-"and her son, ten years old." As a mother, it was a joy to see someone so completely embrace my child, and I felt a slight twinge of jealousy that my welcome from the Professor was always much more reserved.

"I'm so glad you've come!" he said, without any of the questions he asked me every morning. Bewildered by the unexpected greeting, my son stiffened, but managed a polite answer. The Professor took off my son's Hanshin Tigers baseball cap and rubbed his head. Then he gave him the nickname before he'd even learned his real one.

"I'm going to call you Root," he said. "The square root sign is a generous symbol, it gives shelter to all the numbers." And he quickly took off the note on his sleeve and made the addition: "The new housekeeper… and her son, ten years old,."

At first I made us name tags, thinking that if the Professor weren't the only one with notes clipped to him he might feel less anxious. I told my son to change his school name tag for one I made that read "." The experiment proved less successful than I'd hoped. No matter how much time passed, I was always the young woman who made painfully slow progress with numbers, and my son would be the boy who simply appeared, and was embraced.

My son soon grew accustomed to the Professor's enthusiastic greeting and even came to enjoy it. He would take off his cap at the door and present the flat top of his head, as if to show how proud he was to be worthy of the name Root. And for his part, the Professor never missed his cue, he mentioned the square root whenever he met my son.

My contract stipulated that I would make dinner for him at six o'clock and leave at seven after finishing the dishes; but the Professor began objecting to this schedule as soon as my son arrived on the scene.

"I won't stand for it! If you have to finish here and then make another meal once you get home, Root won't get his dinner until eight o'clock. That just won't do. It's inefficient; it's illogical. Children should be in bed by eight o'clock. You can't deprive a child of his sleep-that's when he does his growing."

For a mathematician, his argument wasn't very scientific, but I decided to ask the director of the agency if it would be possible to deduct the cost of our dinner from my salary.

The Professor had never before thanked me for my efforts in the kitchen, but his attitude changed when the three of us sat down to dinner together for the first time. His manners were exemplary. He sat up very straight and ate quietly, without spilling so much as a drop of his soup on the table or his napkin-all of which seemed odd, given how terrible his manners had been when it was just the two of us.

"What's the name of your school?" he asked.

"Is your teacher nice?

"How was lunch today?

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"

As he squeezed lemon on his chicken or picked out the carrots from his soup, the Professor would ask Root one question after another, without hesitating, even when the question concerned the past or the future. He was determined to make our dinner hour as peaceful and pleasant as possible. Though Root's answers to his questions were mostly perfunctory, the Professor listened attentively, and it was thanks to his efforts that we ate together without drifting into any awkward silences.

He was not simply humoring a child. Whenever Root would put his elbows on the table or clatter his dishes or commit any other breach of etiquette (all things the Professor had done himself at his earlier solitary meals), the Professor would gently correct him.

"You have to eat more," he said one evening. "A child's job is to grow."

"I'm the shortest one in my class," said Root.

"Don't let that bother you. You're storing up energy, pretty soon you'll have a growth spurt. One of these days, you're going to feel your bones begin to stretch out and grow."

"Did that happen to you?" Root wanted to know.

"No, unfortunately, in my case, all that energy was wasted on other things."

"What other things?"

"On my friends. I had some very close friends, but as it turned out they weren't the sort you could play baseball or kick-the-can with. In fact, playing with them didn't involve moving at all."

"Were your friends sick?"

"Just the opposite. They were big and strong as a rock. But since they lived in my head, I could only play with them there. So I ended up growing a strong brain instead of a strong body."

"I see," said Root. "Your friends were numbers. My mom says you're a great math teacher."

"You're a bright boy. Very bright. That's correct, numbers were my only friends… But that's why you need to get lots of exercise while you're young. Do you understand? And you have to eat everything on your plate, even the things you don't like. And if you're still hungry, you can have anything on my plate, too."

"Thanks!"

Root had never enjoyed dinner as much as he did when we ate with the Professor. He answered the Professor's questions and let him fill his plate to overflowing, and whenever he could, he looked curiously around the room or stole a glance at the notes on the Professor's suit.

Root was a child who had rarely been embraced. When I first saw him in the hospital nursery, I felt something closer to fear than to joy. His eyelids and earlobes and even his feet were still swollen and damp from the amniotic fluid. His eyes were half-closed, but he didn't seem to be asleep. His tiny arms and legs, protruding awkwardly from the oversized gown, flailed from time to time as if in protest at having been left here by mistake.

I was eighteen, ignorant, and alone. My cheeks were sunken from morning sickness that had continued right up to the moment I lay down on the delivery table. My hair stank with sweat, and my pajamas were still stained where my water had broken.

There were fifteen babies in the nursery and he was the only one awake. It was before dawn and the halls were empty except for the women at the nurse's station. His fists had been clenched tight, but at that moment he opened them, and then awkwardly bent them closed again. The small fingernails were dark and discolored with traces of what I assumed was my blood.

"Excuse me," I called, staggering down to the nurse's station. "I'd like to cut my baby's fingernails. He seems to be moving his hands a lot and I'm afraid he'll scratch himself…" Perhaps I was trying to convince myself that I was a good mother.

From the time of my earliest memories, I had no father. My mother had fallen in love with a man she could never marry, and she had raised me by herself. She worked at a reception hall that people hired for weddings. She had started out helping wherever she was needed-bookkeeping, dressing the wedding parties, flower arranging, table coordination-and ended up managing the whole place.