Apostolos Doxiadis - Uncle Petros and Goldbach

To push it to its limit I used a casual tone: 'G. H. Hardy's sexual inclinations do not concern me,' I said. 'All that is relevant, vis-ä-vis his opinion of your "bean method", is that he was a great mathematician!'

Uncle Petros' face went crimson. 'Bollocks,' he growled. 'Prove it!'

'I don't have to,' I said dismissively. 'His theorems speak for themselves.'

'Oh?Which one?'

I stated two or three of the results I remembered from his textbook.

'Ha!' Uncle Petros snarled. 'Mere calculations of the grocery-bill variety! But show me one great idea, one inspired insight… You can't? That's because there isn't one!' He was fuming now. 'Oh, and while you're at it, tell me of a theorem the old pansy proved on his own, without good old Littlewood or poor dear Ramanujan holding his hand – or whatever other part of his anatomy it was they were holding!'

The mounting nastiness signalled that we were approaching a breakthrough. A tiny extra bit of annoyance was probably all that was necessary to bring it about.

'Really, Uncle,’ I said, trying to sound as haughty as possible. This is beneath you. After all, whatever theorems Hardy proved, they were certainly more important than yours!'

'Oh yes?' he snapped back. 'More important than Goldbach's Conjecture?'

I burst into incredulous laughter, despite myself. 'But you didn't prove Goldbach's Conjecture, Uncle Petros!'

'I didn't prove it, but -'

He broke off in mid-sentence. His expression betrayed he'd said more than he wanted to.

'You didn't prove it but what?’ I pressed him. 'Come on, Uncle, complete what you were going to say! You didn't prove it but were very dose to it? I'm right – am I not?'

Suddenly, he stared at me as if he were Hamlet and I his father's ghost. It was now or never. I leapt up from my seat.

'Oh, for God's sake, Uncle,' I cried. ‘I’m not my father or Uncle Anargyros or grandfather Papachristos! I know some mathematics, remember? Don't give me that crap about Gödel and the Incompleteness Theorem! Do you think I swallowed for a single moment that fairy tale of your "intuition telling you the Conjecture was unprovable"! No – I knew it from the very start for what it was, a pathetic excuse for your failure. Sourgrapes!’

His mouth opened in wonder – from ghost I must have been transformed into a celestial vision.

'I know the whole truth, Uncle Petros,’ I continued fervently. 'You got to within a hair's breadth of the proof! You were almost there… Almost… All but the final step…' – my voice was coming out in a humming, deep chant -'… and then, you lost your nerve! You chickened out, Uncle dearest, didn't you? What happened! Did you run out of willpower or were you just too scared to follow the path to its ultimate conclusion? Whatever the case, you'd always known it deep inside: the fault is not with the Incompleteness of Mathematics!'

My last words had made him recoil and I thought I might as well play the part to the hilt: I grabbed him by the shoulders and shouted straight into his face.

'Face it, Uncle! You owe it to yourself, can't you see that? To your courage, to your brilliance, to all those long, fruitless, lonely years! The blame for not proving Goldbach's Conjecture is all your own – just as the triumph would have been totally yours if you'd succeeded! But you didn't succeed! Goldbach's Conjecture is provable and you knew that all along! It's just that you didn't manage to prove it! You failed -you failed, God damn it, and you've got to admit it, at last!'

I had run out of breath.

As for Uncle Petros, for a slight moment his eyes closed and he wavered. I thought that he was going to pass out, but no – he instantly came to, his inner turmoil now unexpectedly melting into a soft, mellow smile.

I smiled too: naively, I thought that my wild ranting had miraculously achieved its purpose. In fact, at that moment I would have made a bet that his next words would be something like: 'You are absolutely right. I failed. I admit it. Thank you for helping me do it, most favoured of nephews. Now, I can die happy'

Alas, what he actually said was: 'Will you be a good boy and go get me five more kilos of beans?'

I was stunned – all of a sudden he was the ghost and I Hamlet.

'We – we must finish our discussion first,' I faltered, too shocked for anything stronger.

But then he started pleading: 'Please! Please, please, please get me some more beans!'

His tone was so intolerably pathetic that my defences crumbled to dust. For better or for worse, I knew that my experiment in enforced self-confrontation had ended.

Buying uncooked beans in a country where people don't do their grocery shopping in the middle of the night was a worthy challenge to my developing entrepreneurial skills. I drove from taverna to taverna, beguiling the cooks into selling me from their pantry stock a kilo here, half a kilo there, until I accumulated the required quantity. (It was probably the most expensive five kilos of beans ever.)

When I got back to Ekali, it was past midnight. I found Uncle Petros waiting for me at the garden gate.

'You are late!' was his only greeting.

I could see that he was in a state of tremendous agitation.

'Everything all right, Uncle?'

'Are these the beans?'

'They are, but what's the matter? What are you so worked up about?'

Without answering he grabbed the bag. 'Thank you,' he said and began to close the gate.

'Shan't I come in?' I asked, surprised.

'It's too late,’ he said.

I was reluctant to leave him until I found out what was going on.

'We don't have to talk mathematics,’ I said. 'We can have a little game of chess or, even better, drink some herbal tea and gossip about the family.'

'No,’ he said with finality. 'Goodnight.' He walked fast towards his small house.

'When is the next lesson?' I shouted af ter him.

‘I’ll call you,’ he said, went in and banged the door behind him.

I remained standing on the pavement for a while, wondering what to do, whether to attempt once again to enter the house, to talk to him, to see if he was all right. But I knew he could be stubborn as a mule. Anyway, our lesson and my noctumal search for beans had drained me of all energy.

Driving back to Athens I was pestered by my conscience. For the first time, I questioned my course of action. Could my high-handed stance, supposedly intended to lead Uncle Petros into a therapeutic showdown, have been nothing more than my own need to get even, an attempt to avenge the trauma he'd inflicted on my teenage seif? And, even if that weren't so, what right did I have to make the poor old man face

the phantoms of his past, despite himself? Had I seriously considered the consequences of my inexcusable immaturity? The unanswered questions abounded, but still, by the time I got home I had rationalized myself out of the moral tight spot: the distress I'd obviously caused Uncle Petros had most probably been the necessary – the obligatory – step in the process of his redemption. What I'd told him was, after all, too much to digest at one go. Obviously the poor man only needed a chance to think things over in peace. He had to admit his failure to himself, before he could do so to me…

But if that was the case, why the extra five kilos of beans?

A hypothesis had begun to form in my mind, but it was too outrageous to be given serious consideration – until morning anyway.

Nothing in this world is truly new – certainly not the high dramas of the human spirit. Even when one such appears to be an original, on closer examination you realize it's been enacted before, with different protagonists, of course, and quite possibly with many variations in its development. But the main argument, the basic premise, repeats the same old story.