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

She was a strong woman who hated nothing more than having people think of her daughter as poor and fatherless. Though we were, in fact, poor, she did her best to make us look and feel rich. She asked the women who worked in the dressmaking department to give us scraps of material from which she made all my clothes. She arranged for the organist at the hall to give me piano lessons at a discount. And she brought home the leftover flowers and made pretty arrangements for the apartment.

I suppose I became a housekeeper because I kept house for my mother from the time I was a small child. When I was barely two and not quite potty trained, I would wash out my own panties if I had an accident; and before I was even in elementary school, I was using the knives in the kitchen and cutting up the ingredients to make fried rice. By the time I was ten, I not only took care of the whole apartment, but I was even paying the electric bill and attending meetings of the neighborhood association in my mother's place.

My mother never said a word against my father and always insisted he was a fine man and terribly handsome. He managed a restaurant somewhere, but the specifics were always kept from me. I was given to understand, however, that he was tall, fluent in English, and a connoisseur of opera.

The image I have of my father is that of a statue in a museum. No matter how close I come to him, I can't get his attention, he continues to stare off into the distance without looking down, and he never reaches out his hand to me.

It wasn't until I entered adolescence that it occurred to me how odd it was that the wonderful man my mother described had abandoned us and had never offered even the least bit of economic support. But by that time I had no interest in learning more about him, and I accepted the role of silent accomplice when it came to my mother's illusions.

It was my pregnancy that utterly destroyed those illusions, along with the others she'd carefully stitched together from fabric scraps, piano lessons, and leftover flowers. It happened not long after I'd started my junior year of high school.

The boy was someone I'd met at my after-school job, a college student majoring in electrical engineering. He was a quiet and cultured young man, but he lacked the decency to take responsibility for what had happened. The mysterious knowledge of electricity that had attracted me to him in the first place proved useless, and he became just another careless man who vanished from my world.

Once my pregnancy became obvious, there was nothing I could do to appease my mother's anger, even though we now shared the experience of giving birth to a fatherless child. It was a melodramatic sort of anger. Her feelings seemed to block out my own. I left home in the twenty-second week of my pregnancy and I lost all contact with her.

When I brought my baby home from the hospital, it was to public housing that had been set up for single mothers, and the only person who welcomed us was the woman who served as matron for the institution. I folded up the one picture I had saved of the baby's father and stuffed it into the little wooden box they had given me at the hospital to hold the umbilical cord.

As soon as I'd managed to get the baby into a day care center, I went straight to the Akebono Housekeeping Agency and arranged for an interview. It was the only job I could think of that matched my limited skills.

Shortly before Root entered elementary school, my mother and I reconciled: a fancy backpack arrived in the mail for him. This happened at the same time that I had left the single mothers' home and set up house for ourselves. My mother was still managing the wedding hall. But just as our troubles seemed to be over and I'd begun to see how comforting it could be to have a grandmother for my child, my mother suddenly died of a brain hemorrhage-which may be why I was even happier than Root himself when I saw the Professor hug him.

The three of us soon fell into a pleasant routine. There was no change in my schedule or workload, other than making more food for dinner. Fridays were the busiest, as I had to prepare food for the weekend and store it away in the freezer. I would make meat loaf and mashed potatoes, or poached fish and vegetables, and explain repeatedly what went with what and how to defrost the food, although the Professor never quite figured out how to use the microwave. Nevertheless, when I arrived on Monday morning, all the food I'd prepared was gone. The meat loaf and fish had somehow been thawed and eaten, and the dirty dishes had been washed and put away in the cupboard. I was sure that the old woman took care of the Professor when I wasn't there, but as long as I was around, she never made an appearance. I had no idea why she had placed such a firm restriction on communication between her house and the Professor's, but I decided that my next challenge was to figure out how to get to know her.

The Professor's problems, on the other hand, were all mathematical. He never seemed particularly proud of his accomplishments, even when he had spent a long time solving an equation that had won both the prize money and my praise.

"It was just a little puzzle," he would say, "a game"; and his tone sounded more sad than modest. "The person who made the problem already knew the answer. Solving a problem for which you know there's an answer is like climbing a mountain with a guide, along a trail someone else has laid. In mathematics, the truth is somewhere out there in a place no one knows, beyond all the beaten paths. And it's not always at the top of the mountain. It might be in a crack on the smoothest cliff or somewhere deep in the valley."

In the afternoon, when he heard Root's voice at the door, the Professor came out of his study, no matter how absorbed he was in his work. Though he had always hated to have his "thinking" interrupted, he now seemed more than willing to give it up for my son.

Most days, however, Root simply delivered his backpack and went off to the park to play baseball with his friends, and the Professor would retreat dejectedly to his study.

So the Professor seemed particularly cheerful when the weather turned rainy and he was able to help Root with his math homework.

"I think I'm a little smarter when I'm in the Professor's office," Root told me. There were no bookshelves in the little apartment where we lived, so the Professor's study, with its stacks of volumes lining the walls, seemed magical to him. The Professor would sweep aside the notebooks and clips and eraser shavings on his desk to make space for Root, and then he would open the textbook.

How is it possible for a professor of advanced mathematics to teach a child in elementary school? The Professor was especially gifted, he had the most wonderful way of teaching fractions and ratios and volume, and it occurred to me that all parents should be giving this kind of help to their children.

Whether it was a word problem or just a simple calculation, the Professor made Root read it aloud first.

"353 × 840 =…

"6239 ÷ 23 =…

"4.62 + 2.74 =…

"A problem has a rhythm of its own, just like a piece of music," the Professor said. "Once you get the rhythm, you get the sense of the problem as a whole, and you can see where the traps might be waiting."

And so Root read in a loud, clear voice: "I bought two handkerchiefs and two pairs of socks for ¥380. Two handkerchiefs and five pairs of socks cost ¥710. How much did each handkerchief and each pair of socks cost?"

"So, where do we start?" asked the Professor.

"Well, it seems pretty hard."

"You're right. This is the trickiest one in your homework today, but you read it well. The problem consists of three sentences. The handkerchiefs and socks appear three times each, and you had the rhythm just right: so many handkerchiefs… so many socks… so many yen; handkerchiefs… socks… yen. You made a boring problem sound just like a poem."