The Tenth Muse

by Catherine Chung

  Still, the research was interesting, useful, and lucrative, and after some years of productive work of this kind, Charles Lee invited me to teach at his university. That lectureship led to my first tenure-track job. From there I published, I advised students, and my reputation grew and grew. Charles Lee and I became lifelong collaborators and friends. Franzi, too, in Göttingen—I never saw her again in person, but we corresponded for years, by long and frequent letters and by telephone, and we became quite close.

  At some point I turned away from number theory and the study of primes to work on dynamical systems, which as it turned out, was useful in attacking any number of problems in almost every other field of mathematics. And not just mathematics, but physics, biology, chemistry, cosmology, and computer science. Still, I never forgot my first love—numbers, and I eagerly followed every new assault on the Riemann hypothesis with interest. And with the years, though Fermat’s last theorem and the twin prime conjecture both fell, the Riemann hypothesis remained intact and only grew in stature.

  FOR SOME YEARS following my return from Germany, I searched for records of Sophie’s family with my father’s and—to my surprise—Linda’s help. After a suspicious, uncharitable moment when I thought she was helping search for my birth parents to lessen the bond between my father and me, I finally began to see Linda for who she was: possessive and protective of my father, yes, but also someone who had stayed loyal to a man with a complicated history. She had learned to make him happy and, maybe more importantly, had allowed him to make her happy too.

  Together, the three of us searched for the truth of what had happened to Sophie and her family. I could not find any records of her or her father, but what little we could find on the rest of her family revealed that they had died before the end of the war. The confirmations, each time they came for her mother, her siblings, her aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, were hard to bear, old history as it was. Each death, with so few details, was still a blow.

  After many years of silence, I heard from Karl in the late 1980s asking if I would be willing to take a new test that would be able to confirm whether or not we were related by blood. I said yes, and had a blood sample drawn and sent to a laboratory somewhere in Germany. Some weeks later, the results told us what—for many years—I’d already taken as fact. Karl Meisenbach was my cousin, and Sophie and Xi Ling were my parents. It came together as easily as a puzzle, as cleanly as a proof.

  I thought perhaps the confirmation would put me more closely in touch with Karl and Henry, and that maybe I’d finally get to meet their child, but after that brief contact, they remained as unresponsive as before. I was baffled both by Karl’s sudden request and his subsequent remoteness after I complied, but by then I had long given up on trying to stay close to him or Henry.

  That year, I visited China for the first time, and I made my way to the only address I had ever found for Xi Ling, which was not an address at all, just “Hubei Province, China.” Everyone said it’d be impossible to find any records, but I asked around anyway. I learned some rudimentary Chinese in preparation for the trip, and Charles Lee put me in touch with a guide and a translator there, who accompanied me for the first two weeks. I traveled the last on my own. Everywhere I went, someone had heard of someone who had gone to Germany to study math, and I was taken to see a dozen Xi Lings, but every lead was a dead end.

  The whole time I was there, I kept thinking about my mother Meiying. I had searched for her, too, but to no avail. My father hadn’t known a single detail about where she might have come from. She had refused to tell him—he’d never even known her last name before she took his. In China, I saw her everywhere. In the faces of the girls who ran barefoot down the streets, in the faces of the graceful women dressed in beautiful clothes. I saw her even in the faces of the grannies squatting, selling produce on the side of the road.

  Toward the end of my stay, while I was visiting the famed mountain of Wudang, I saw a boy practicing kung fu in front of a temple. Facing the sun, he moved with breathtaking grace, and I thought of Franzi hiding behind a curtain, watching Xi Ling as he went through the motions of his daily practice. I wondered what my life might have been like if I had grown up here, in China, if I would have learned to move like that—if that might have become my passion, instead of math.

  Near Wutai, I met an old Buddhist monk with long white hair, who had been to the West when he was a little boy and spoke some English. He spent an evening drinking with me in the filthiest hotel I’d ever seen and invited me to go on a hike with him up a high, steep mountain.

  He asked what kind of work I did, and when I told him I was a mathematician, he nodded wisely. He wanted to talk about time, and how everyone thinks it goes forward—and possibly backward, but how in his practice time isn’t linear at all, but goes in all directions, always. And not just flat along a plane, back and forth—but round and round. Circling and circling. Everything is happening at once, he said, and has happened or will happen.

  I told him about wormholes and physics, and parts of the universe that seem far apart but are actually touching, and particles that aren’t touching, but are somehow so connected that if you do something to one on one side of the universe, the other will respond from all the way across.

  He told me about reincarnation, how past lives affect this one, how we’ve met everyone at least once before: how anyone could have been our mother. How anyone could have been our child. How our enemy in this life will be our lover in another. After all, isn’t it the people we’ve loved most who have wounded us most deeply? By now, he said, we have lived a thousand lives already, all of us—by the end of the world, we’ll already have been everyone else.

  He was taking me, he said, to a mountain peak that was considered to be the seat of one of the major bodhisattvas, a place where time and space collapsed. He was speaking in the language of his religion, but it sounded like math to me. Multiple lives, like multiple universes: time as a thing that could be manipulated along with space. The monk said the place we were going to was a place where people went to have a vision, and that it was the vision that was the destination, not the physical place.

  He had made it sound like we could make the hike in a day, but in fact it took us several. I was unprepared, and when we summited, I was haggard and dirty and half starved. We had rationed bits of dried vegetables the monk carried in his satchel, we had scavenged for roots, we had begged meals and lodgings from passersby. When I complained of exhaustion or hunger or thirst, the monk laughed at me and said it would ensure a better vision.

  “Here you are!” the monk said, when we reached the destination, which was not the destination, but the place where I would have my vision of another place that was the seat of a bodhisattva.

  There was a stone statue of a beautiful man with long earlobes, dressed in a flowing gown. “This is the bodhisattva Kwan-Yin,” he said.

  “Kwan-Yin who hears all human suffering? Isn’t Kwan-Yin a woman?”

  “Kwan-Yin is both,” he said. “Both man and woman. Here she is a man.”

  I looked at the statue and felt as if indeed space and time were collapsing: my mother’s story. Gödel’s theorem: truth and untruth.

  “What do I do?” I asked.

  “First you bow,” the monk said. “Then you bathe the statue with the water. And then you have a drink.” And so I watched him and did as he did.

  “Now,” he said, “you sit and meditate. You wait for your vision.”

  “For how long?” I asked.

  “As long as it takes,” he said.

  And so I sat. I should have asked him how to meditate, but I didn’t. I sat with my legs crossed and my eyes closed on top of the mountain and waited for my vision. I tried to clear my mind, but it was full of thoughts. I thought of my mother who had been sold by her father to protect her brothers, somewhere in this country. I wondered what had happened to them, and if I had been one of them in another life. I wondered if I had been her mother, her father, the Japane
se soldier who had taken her. I thought of my father who’d tried to give her something to hold on to, and broken her trust, instead. I wondered if in some parallel universe they were together, and happy. If in some other world Sophie and Xi Ling still lived. I thought of Peter Hall and wondered if in another life we’d married and had children. If there was a universe where everyone got to be happy.

  I sat for a long time, thinking, waiting for an answer, or a vision, or a visitation, and while none of these arrived, as I sat, I sensed the trees regarding me, as my mother had shown me they could, the day before she left. And not just the trees, but the mountains, and not just the mountains, but the sky. I felt my mind reach out to greet them. When I finally rose, I felt different. I felt changed. I looked for the old monk, but he had left me there. He had disappeared. Still, I felt calm without his guidance and ready to make the hike back down alone.

  Chapter 31

  IN THE END, I KEPT MY WORD TO HENRY AND ALLOWED Karl to keep the Schieling-Meisenbach theorem: I never breathed a word of the story to anyone. They had two more children, who grew up and had children of their own. But I was right when I left Germany to think that Henry and I would never be close again. There was a necessary distance between us that I regretted, especially since I never had children, and hers happened to be—along with Karl—my only known living relatives.

  When I was a child, I used to search for symmetries in nature: now that I’m old, I find myself in the habit of recognizing it everywhere in my life. I spent a great deal of my younger years chasing down the mystery of where and whom I came from, and in my later years, I’ve spent a great deal of time contemplating just whom and what I’ll leave behind. This question of lineage that preoccupied me for so much of my life turns out in the end to be a question of whom I claim as my own, and who claims me.

  There are the claims of scholarship: the ones who formed your mind, the ones whose minds you formed. In math the students who studied directly under Emmy Noether are called her children. Those who studied underneath them are her grandchildren. In this regard I am wealthy—I have many mothers and fathers, and many children—and I claim kinship with Charles Lee, with Ramanujan, with Gauss and Hilbert and Riemann and Emmy Noether and more.

  Of the claims of blood, I cannot say too much. In my life there has been Karl, and his children whom I have never met, but whom I love because of Henry. When I think of him, I feel only sadness and wonder what good are the claims of blood if they allow you to stand aside while your kin are murdered—what good if you take credit for what should have been theirs?

  And then there are the claims of love. The love of those who bore you. The love of those who raised you. The love you find, the love that breaks you. The love you carry from afar. Against these I am helpless: I surrender. To my two sets of parents, to the nun who saved me, to Henry, even, and the memory of Peter Hall, yes, I say—who I am now came from you and will return to you. I am yours.

  THREE YEARS AGO KARL DIED, and though we had not spoken in decades, Henry called and asked me to come to her in Germany after his funeral. And so of course I went. The town was much the same as before: beautiful and placid, a pleasant and unassuming place that had once been a paradise for mathematics. Henry was gaunt but elegant as ever, draped in deep black silk, face still radiant through her grief, alive with expression and wit. Still, she was an old woman now, her hair gone gray, her skin thin as tissue paper. I touched my own face self-consciously knowing how much I, too, had aged. I remembered again that train trip to Göttingen—let’s never get married, Henry had said. But she’d been the one to get married. She’d been the one to have children. And I’d been the one to have the dazzling—by any measure—career. Both our lives, it occurred to me, had come with their own disappointments, their own specific kinds of loneliness.

  What had I hoped for going to her? Friendship, maybe. To exclaim at how differently things had turned out than we’d thought. To see her children, perhaps. What I got instead was dinner at a restaurant, just the two of us, and a box of papers, which she asked me not to look at until I was home.

  “What’s in it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, and her voice was weary—a door closed against me. “But Karl said you would know what to do with what’s in there.”

  “Okay,” I said. And then, “Henry, shall I stay for an extra few days? We could catch up properly. I could meet your children.”

  But Henry shook her head. “I’m tired, Kat,” she said. “I’m just not up for it right now.”

  “I could help,” I said. I smiled. “I could clean your house for you.”

  “No,” Henry said. “But thank you.”

  I nodded, trying not to let it show how much her refusal had hurt me.

  The mathematician Charles Fefferman once said that mathematics is like playing chess with the devil. You don’t know the rules, you don’t know the game—and your only advantage is that you can take back an infinite number of moves, while the devil can take back none. I wished I had an infinite number of moves with Henry to figure things out—to find the words to speak, the key that would unlock again the friendship between us.

  There were so many things I wanted to say to her: a lifetime of things. I thought of the stories we’d swapped on the train on that first fateful trip to Göttingen, and how I’d told her my mother’s stories about the tenth muse, and Kwan-Yin. Somehow, I’d always thought those were the two options available to me. The tenth muse gave up everything to claim her own voice. Kwan-Yin gave up everything on behalf of everyone else. In my life, I had almost always chosen the path of the tenth muse—my work, my own vision, had always been my priority. But with Henry, I had always put her first. I had tended to her wishes, her suffering, above all other considerations. Even now, I felt compelled to do as she wished.

  Once, I had said to her, “I choose you.” As if by choosing her, I could not choose myself, too. I wished I could tell her that perhaps it didn’t have to be just one or the other—perhaps we had more choices than that, and the world had tricked us out of seeing them.

  But Henry’s face was blank, her jaw tense. She did not want to talk with me. The choice, for her, was made.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll go home.” And I took the long flight back, full of disappointment.

  INSIDE THE BOX were Karl’s notes: pages and pages of beautiful, impeccable math, going back years. And beneath his notes was a small leather notebook, Sophie’s notebook—the one Karl had claimed he had lost. I lifted it out of the pile of papers, hands trembling. How could this be? Had the whole search, the scene with Martin—all been a manufactured ruse? I had mourned the loss of this notebook like it was a person, but finding it now did not fill me with gladness, as I’d always imagined—but a sort of wounded bewilderment that grew when I found underneath it pages and pages of notes written in Sophie’s hand. Notes that Karl had told me long ago didn’t exist.

  They were unfinished, but when I started reading them, it was clear to me that they were the beginning of a staggering piece of work. I realized with growing excitement that she was making use of the Schieling-Meisenbach theorem to set up an ingenious attack on the Riemann hypothesis, which—whether successful or not—would be the furthest anyone had gotten to solving it yet.

  Underneath these notes, at the very bottom of the box was one lone letter, written on a piece of paper whose shape suggested it’d been torn out of Sophie’s notebook, dated November 1943.

  Dear Karl, it began, Xi Ling and I have been walking so long I’ve lost count of the days. Just imagine, me losing count! But the days are short, and the nights so cold and dark, and the mountains go on and on, and the border seems so far away. Please pray for our safe passage. If you have word from my mother or brothers, tell them this: that I wrote and said I am coming to find them.

  Today, the sun stayed behind the clouds, and the frost on the ground stayed crisp and white and did not melt from the ground. It was a hard day, but when it seemed we could not go
on, we saw a hut in the distance, at the top of the mountain we have been ascending. We were afraid to approach it, afraid to be caught, but this time there was no choice but to risk it. When we finally reached it, we saw that the hut was in fact a lovely stone cottage, unlocked and empty, standing stout and welcoming in the bitter wind. And behind the cottage was a field of pumpkins all glazed over with frost.

  Xi Ling went out to find wood. How loyal he is. How tireless. You are wrong about him. He will never leave me. I know this. When he returned, he returned with one of the pumpkins, much too large for us—an extravagance of pumpkin, he said—and he threw it into the fire that he built, and as it bubbled, the whole night went dark around us. We sat and waited, so hungry—and when we finally ate, the earthy rich taste of the pumpkin was almost too much to bear. But tonight we have eaten something hot and will sleep by the warmth of a fire.

  Even now, the baby kicks, always active, as if to hurry us on our way. But I think she is pleased by tonight’s arrangements. We will leave this cottage in the morning. I will leave this letter addressed to you on the table and trust you will receive it: we feel certain that this was left unlocked for travelers such as us, a safe harbor for those who journey on.

  Be well, my dear cousin. Be good and safe.

  Sophie

  I SAT FOR A LONG TIME after reading this note. So Karl had always had this in his possession. All these years, when it would have meant so much to me, he’d kept it hidden. Everything he’d told me had been a lie. Still, why had he left this to me now? Would he have done so if that test he’d asked me to take so many years ago hadn’t confirmed that we were cousins? And were the contents of this box supposed to serve as a confession or a defense? The one thing I knew was that if I’d exposed Karl years ago, I would never have seen the contents of this box: this was an acknowledgment of that, a reward for my silence, my complicity.