“‘So they lived next door for two weeks, but someone tipped off the Germans. When they came, the new family did not have enough time to hide. We all heard the heavy boots of the soldiers coming up the stairs, and I ran across the hall to warn the girl and her lover, but they had already heard, and there was no way out, no place to hide. The girl put her finger to her lips and showed me a metal toolbox in their kitchen. Inside it she’d hidden her baby, wrapped in blankets.
“‘When the Nazis took her away, a hand on either arm, she went quietly, no fussing. She went with almost no noise, so as not to end up waking the baby. Her lover—also quietly—but with a significant look at me followed by a glance at the toolbox, followed the girl and the soldiers.
“‘I bought goat’s milk and a bottle, and for two days, I cared for her as best I could. I wish I could raise her as my own, but who would believe me? Uncle Romain says the girl and her man are not coming back. He says if I do not get rid of this baby, he will take it to the authorities himself.
“‘Liliane,’ my sister said. ‘Please take this baby. Keep her safe. You must never tell anyone her mother was a Jew or it won’t be safe for her.’”
“‘SO YOU SEE why I could not tell the other nuns,’ Liliane finished, pressing one of her small hands against my bad arm, so hard that I winced. ‘If the Nazis ever come back, I know there will be some who would be all too eager to turn over a Jewish child. As it is, even now we do not take them in.’
“Well, Katherine, what could I do? My parents were dead. I had no family, no one to go home to. The war had battered my body and spirit—days upon days of mankind doing its worst to each other, and now here was this baby who needed my protection.
“‘I’ll take her,’ I said. ‘I’ll find a home for her.’ And then I asked, ‘Do you want to come too?’
“Liliane looked startled and shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘But thank you. I have pledged my life to God.’ She leaned forward and kissed me quite gently on the mouth. Then she pulled away and took something out of her pocket. It was a notebook bound with battered leather, tied with a string.
“‘It belongs to her,’ she said. ‘It was wrapped inside her blankets: it’s the only thing in the world she owns,’ and she pressed it into my hands.
“When I left France, I promised Liliane that I would stay in touch, and tell her where you ended up. I promised to make sure that whoever took you in would love you.
“And I returned, prepared to turn you over to an orphanage, or to some needy family who couldn’t have children of their own. But by then I’d watched you grow, witnessed your first steps, seen your first smile. You were the Baby Who Never Smiled, but after you were mine, you smiled for me, and you cried for me, and you clung to me and scratched me like I belonged to you, and for a long time, you would only sleep against my chest.
“I always meant to let you go. But every time I let anyone else look after you, you cried like someone had stabbed you through the heart. I knew you needed a mother, but in the end, I couldn’t believe you’d be better off without me. How was I any different from a widower? I asked myself. In the end, I loved you too much to give you up.
“I wrote to Liliane and the children all through the following year, but I never received an answer. After the war was over, I searched for them, writing letters of inquiry and placing many long-distance calls, but I reached no satisfactory answers. The orphanage had been disassembled, the nuns reassigned. The children had been separated and sent elsewhere—some to relatives, some to other orphanages. In any case, there was no way to trace them, no record of where they or the nuns had gone.”
Chapter 17
TOPOLOGY, THE FIELD OF MATHEMATICS THAT I worked on with Peter, distinguishes itself from other branches through its concern with the positions of objects in relation to one another rather than their shapes or the distances between them. The famous Königsberg bridge problem, for example, takes the city of Königsberg, which is set on opposite sides of the Pregel River and contains two large islands connected to each other and the mainland by seven bridges. The problem is: How can a traveler walk through the city in a way that he crosses each bridge once and only once? The islands can only be reached by the bridges, and each bridge once stepped upon must be crossed all the way. The start and end of the journey need not be at the same point.
Euler solved the generalized form of this problem in 1735—showing that the paths within the island and the city do not matter—it is only the list of land masses and the bridges connecting them that figure in to the question at hand. Land and bridges are reduced to nodes and edges, and from this abstraction, this simplification, graph theory was born, and the foundations of topology were laid.
In topology, you are still working within the realm of mathematics, but here you get to choose a universe in which the connections between things are primary, where the properties of space are preserved despite continuous deformations. Its study is an exercise in ignoring the trees to see the forest—and what it offers is a glimpse from a great distance—a view of the deep structure of mathematics itself. Using notions of preservation and connectedness, it is possible for a coffee mug to transform through a series of continuous deformations into a donut, and because of this, in this system, the object is considered to have remained fundamentally the same.
Setting aside topology, consider that the number 2 can be expressed as 2, or as 1 + 1, or as 4/2. It all depends on which expression you decide to use, and each expression shows us something different about the same number. In the same way, there are theorems that are stated differently but are in fact identical to one another. Approached from different directions, they come to an equivalent conclusion—but the way they are stated reveals completely different things about different parts of mathematics by shedding light on different aspects of a problem. This is, in part, what makes mathematics so powerful—the ability to see the same thing from a different perspective, the ability to see it transformed. That said, there are always limits. Even in topology, if you break the handle off the coffee mug, it will no longer transform into a donut, just as once you cut a string, it can never go back to what it was.
I STAYED WITH MY FATHER for another week, mending many bridges with him. When he was discharged from the hospital, I accompanied him and Linda home. I told him about Peter, I told him about the math I was doing, and as the days passed, he became stronger. I watched how carefully Linda tended to him, and though my old reluctance persisted, I was grateful to her. By the time I returned to Cambridge, I knew it was time to transform. I didn’t know how, or what it’d entail, just that it needed to happen. I called Otto Behr, who’d extended my invitation to the University of Bonn, and asked if the fellowship he’d offered was still open.
He said it was, but that if I wanted it, I’d have to take it then and there. I told him I would go.
I realize now how unkind and cowardly it was of me to reverse my decision without discussing it with Peter. But when I told him, I was stunned by his anger.
“Are we together or aren’t we?” he asked. “Do we respect each other or not?”
“Of course we are and we do. What are you talking about?” I said.
“How could you make a decision like this without clearing it first?”
“I wasn’t aware I needed to clear things with you,” I said. “When have you ever cleared travel or work decisions with me?”
“This is different and you know it. It’s a whole year, Katherine.”
I knew he was right but felt defensive anyway.
“Listen,” I said. “I wasn’t sure the university would still have space for me, so I called them to check. At that point there was nothing to discuss. But then they said yes, right away, and wanted a decision on the spot. I didn’t have time to tell you before I made a decision.” This was true—but I knew I had also handled things this way so he wouldn’t have the chance to change my mind. Foolishly, short-sightedly, it hadn’t occurred to me that I could hurt him. In my mind, Pet
er was so famous, so established, and held such sway over me, that it was hard for me to acknowledge what power I held over him.
“I’m asking you not to do this,” he said. “I think you need to reconsider.”
“It’s too late to withdraw.”
“It isn’t too late—just tell them you’re not going. Katherine, you need to remember, I’m not just your lover, I’m also your advisor.”
“Hold on,” I said. “Is that a threat? I’ll do what I want, it isn’t your choice.”
“What do you mean, is that a threat? I’m just warning you now, if you go, you’ll come to regret it.”
“How is that not a threat?” I cried. “You don’t own me, Peter. You can’t tell me what to do.”
“I know I don’t own you!” he exclaimed. “You’re twisting my words around. I’m just trying to advise you—I honestly think it’s better for your career if you stay. If you leave now, you’ll break your momentum, and it will be hard to get back on track. You have so many things going for you. I’m trying to look out for your interests.”
“I’ve already made up my mind. I’m choosing myself for once, Peter. I’m following my instincts, and putting myself first.”
He bowed his head. “Well, if I can’t make you listen,” he said, “then there’s nothing more I can do.”
I DON’T REGRET going to Bonn, but looking back, I wish I hadn’t handled the whole thing so badly. I wish I had taken a deep breath instead and reassured Peter that I still loved him and wanted to be with him. That I couldn’t explain, but that something compelled me to go. That I couldn’t wait, and that like any creature who seeks transformation, I had to complete it alone. Whether or not he would have understood, at least I owed him the chance.
When I left, it wasn’t on terrible terms: we both said at the end of all this, we wanted to be with each other. We tipped our foreheads together and cried. He promised to wait, and I promised to call. But I worried something between us had gone sour, and I was making a giant mistake. Still, I made myself get on that plane. On board, I wondered, was this how my mother had felt, leaving us? That it was a choice—her or us? So much had been taken from her. Maybe it felt good to be the one to decide to leave something, or someone, waiting behind.
I arrived in Bonn with most of my papers and the old German notebook, which I’d tried again to decipher after my father’s stories. But it remained incomprehensible. In that way, it was just like the stories my father had told me, something I was doomed to always be circling—held in orbit, unable to get any closer, unable to get away.
I was happy to discover upon my arrival that the program at Bonn offered me quite a lot of freedom. Otto Behr was very kind. He was in his seventies, and quite well known, but solicitous and interested in my work without being overly involved. The graduate students and professors in the program were likewise very open and generous: there was none of the competitiveness and wariness that I had become accustomed to at home—possibly because I was a temporary visitor, and therefore not competing with any of the students for mentorship or funds. The campus itself was unlike anything I’d seen back home—centuries old and sprawling, gorgeous, the buildings and gardens even older than the United States. All around Bonn were enormous, golden trees, punctuated by rubble from the war—enormous piles of stones and dust that used to be buildings. And then there was the Rhine River, wide and curving, grand and timeless, running alongside it all.
The other visiting scholars and foreign students were a joy to meet. We were all there with the sense that we had left our real lives behind, and while I know there must have been those who were homesick or lonely, I threw myself into life in this new place with enthusiastic abandon. For the first time in my life, I found it easy—almost effortless—to make friends. There was Maz, the Iranian classicist and poet; Otto, a brilliant Danish astrochemist; and Leena, an Italian artist with a brutal and beautiful face—not pretty, but mesmerizing and powerful, who attracted both men and women to her with an irresistible force. Then there was Renate, the one German friend in our group: a tall, quiet Sachsen woman with a scar across her face, twisting the edge of her mouth. No one knew how she’d gotten it, and I never dared to ask. There was a strength to her gaze, to everything she did. She was a War Studies scholar working on a book about the children of the war—the Jewish and Gypsy children who’d been reclassified as Christians and Muslims and raised not knowing their heritage; the children in Belgium whose parents had been taken away but survived by hiding in the sewers underneath the cities, living off scraps and trash. The rumor about Renate was that her father had been a high-ranking Nazi officer who kept Jewish servants in his household throughout the war, but as with the scar, no one ever had the temerity to ask her.
The person I grew closest to was a Californian folklorist named Henrietta. She was unlike anyone else I’d ever met. She was lanky and slightly awkward—her body seemed to be arranged entirely of sharp angles—but she used it to her advantage somehow and made it look glamorous. She always wore men’s clothes, but they were impeccably tailored and paired with one extravagant accessory: an inky black suit with a purple tie, or men’s slacks and a silk shirt paired with a string of giant milky pearls.
She went by the name of Henry, and though she had her own dazzling charm, it was vastly different from the dark glitter of our European friends. She was all sunshine and mischief wrapped in sumptuous fabrics and, remarkably, was the first Asian friend I’d ever had. She was also the most straightforward person I’d ever met, always going right for the heart of the matter, asking—only a few moments after we met—“You have the look of heartbreak about you. Are you here to get over someone?” And then when I stammered, flustered and aghast, she continued, “Never mind, that was a terribly rude question to ask, though we’ll certainly get to it soon, I’m sure—I’ve already decided we’ll be fast friends.”
She hammered me with rapid-fire questions and rapid-fire revelations about her own life, but with an openness that entirely disarmed me and spilled over into our every interaction, like when we went grocery shopping together and she grabbed my hand and darted through the crowds on the street, or when she begged me to go to a lecture with her and passed notes to me the entire time.
She had deep dimples on either side of her mouth, and she laughed all the time, and I couldn’t stop looking at her. I tried: I knew what it felt like to have people stare, and even now in Germany, people would halt in their tracks for a double take. Children would follow us around, calling, “Chinesische Frau! Chinesische Frau!”
Henry was unfazed by all the attention, and she was also unfazed by me. She knew tons of Chinese people—just her family could form a small country, she laughed, describing her five siblings and many cousins. And as for the attention from strangers, well, she’d gotten used to it, she said with a shrug. In fact, she dressed for it, she added with a wicked grin.
She charmed everyone, and though I was in so many ways the opposite of her—awkward, guarded—she chose me as her friend “at first sight,” as she said, and wooed me relentlessly, admiring my looks, telling me she had a crush on me, peering over my shoulder at math textbooks and asking what various symbols and statements meant.
“My father drove an ice cream truck for years,” she told me. “He was a scholar and a poet from an aristocratic family in China, but in America, he was no one. So”—and here she gave a wry, knowing laugh—“he was reaaaaally frustrated while I was growing up. But he wasn’t a very hard worker, he just wasn’t used to it—and so my mother was also reaaaaally frustrated, because she had to do everything.”
I was captivated by the way she talked about her family and its difficulties casually, with a knowing, matter-of-fact sense of humor. I always spoke of my family with the utmost gravity, if I had to talk about them at all. Henry would not tolerate evasions, however—she barreled ahead with questions meant to pry open just what you were trying to hide. In the end, I told her everything—about my mother and the stories she used to tel
l me, how beautiful she was, how I felt when she left. And about my father, and of course about Peter.
I was flattered by Henry’s attention and fascinated by the way her friendship transformed the reaction other people seemed to have to me. I was so used to my perpetual status of outsider that I’d stopped questioning in each situation whether this time it was my femaleness or my Asianness or the combination of both that branded me different. Even now, I feel impatient when asked about what being these things mean to me—the expectation that because my race and my gender are often the first things people notice about me, they must also be the most significant to me. When I die, I know the first sentence in my obituary will read: “Asian American woman mathematician dies at the age of X.”
For the first time in my life, I had a friend with whom I could talk of such things, and also a friend who understood implicitly, a friend to whom I need not explain. I was surprised to discover that being friends with Henry opened doors rather than closed them: people paid attention to us, wanted to know us, and under Henry’s expansive, bubbly protection, I felt myself blossoming. I gave myself over to an endless series of parties and dinners, of walking back and forth between my home and those of my companions, pausing to talk on benches, stopping into cafés for hours, reading newspapers together, and pushing books upon each other.
Our conversations tended to lean toward politics. My new friends were passionately opposed to the Vietnam War and intensely curious about the civil rights movement in America, which I had watched unfold on my television with the sense that this drama was not my drama. But my new friends cared about everything and insisted that the marches and protests and speeches and assassinations of the past decade mattered to them as well. They expected me to talk, soliciting my opinion on every matter, as if everything I said was of interest to them. “And now let’s ask our other representative from America,” they’d say when everyone had offered their opinions but me. “I can’t speak for America,” I always began, and they laughed and teased back—wasn’t everyone back home just like me? But they were curious what I thought, and I was humbled to be able to talk with such bright and charismatic thinkers about so many things I had until then thought so little about.
The Tenth Muse Page 14
