The Housekeeper and the Professor

by Yoko Ogawa

  I hid the stain under the platter of roast beef, warmed the soup, and found a match to light the candles. The announcer on the radio said that Yakult had come from behind in the third and was leading the Tigers. Root had the Enatsu card, decorated with a yellow ribbon, hidden in his pocket.

  "There, look. Everything's set. Here, Professor, have a seat." As I took him by the hand, he looked up at last and noticed Root standing beside him.

  "How old are you?" he murmured. "And what was your name again ... your head, it's just like the square root sign.... We can come to know an infinite range of numbers with this one little sign, even those we can't see...." Then the Professor reached across the table and rubbed Root's head.

  11

  On June 24, 1993, there was an article in the newspaper about Andrew Wiles, an Englishman teaching at Princeton University. He had proven Fermat's Last Theorem. There were two large pictures stretching across the page, one a photograph of Wiles, a casually dressed man with curly, receding hair, and the other an engraving of Pierre de Fermat, in a flowing seventeenth-century academic gown. In their own funny way, the two pictures told the story of how long it had taken to solve Fermat's riddle. The article praised Wiles's solution as a triumph of the human intellect and a quantum leap in the field. It also noted that Wiles had built on an idea that had been developed by two Japanese mathematicians, Yutaka Taniyama and Goro Shimura, a proposition known as the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture.

  When I reached the end of the article, I did what I always did when I thought of the Professor. I took out the scrap of paper folded in my wallet, the one on which he had written Euler's formula: eπi + 1 = 0.

  I was glad to know it was there, this unchanging testament to a peaceful soul.

  The Tigers didn't win the pennant in 1992. They might have had a chance if they had won their last two games with Yakult, but they lost 2–5 on October 10 and finished the season in second place, trailing by two games.

  Root was distraught at the time, but years later he came to appreciate what a thrill it had been just to have them reach the playoffs. After the 1993 season, they went into a long slump; and still, well into the new millennium, they are perennial cellar-dwellers. Sixth place, sixth place, fifth, sixth, sixth, sixth, sixth.... They have changed managers many times; Shinjo went to play in America, Minoru Murayama passed away.

  Looking back on it now, the turning point seemed to be that game with Yakult on September 11, 1992. If they had won that game, they might have taken the pennant and perhaps they could have avoided drifting into the slump.

  After we'd cleaned up the party at the Professor's and gone home to our apartment, we immediately turned on the radio. The game was in the final innings, tied 3-3. Root soon fell asleep, but I listened to the end.

  It was the bottom of the ninth with two outs and a man on first. The count was full when Yagi hit what appeared to be a walk-off home run into the left-field stands. But after the scoreboard had already registered two runs for the Tigers, the third-base umpire waved off the home run, signaling that the ball had hit the post and should be scored as a double. The Tigers protested and the game was stopped for thirty-seven minutes while the umpires deliberated. It was after ten thirty when it resumed, with two out and men on second and third. In the end, the Tigers failed to take advantage of the opportunity and the game went to extra innings with everyone in a sour mood.

  As I listened, I thought about the Professor and our parting at the end of the party. Then I took out Euler's formula and studied it again.

  I had left the door to Root's room ajar to be able to hear him. From where I sat, I could see the glove that the Professor had given him set carefully next to his pillow. It was a genuine, Little League–certified, leather glove, and he had been thrilled with it. After Root had blown out the candles and we had turned the lights back on, the Professor noticed the notes that had fallen under the table. The timing of the discovery was fortunate, since the first note he saw reminded him where he had hidden Root's gift.

  The Professor was not used to giving presents. He held out the package as if he were unsure whether Root would accept it, and when Root came running to hug him and kiss him on the cheek, he squirmed uncomfortably. Root had been reluctant to take off the glove the rest of the evening and would probably have kept it on straight through dinner if I hadn't put my foot down. I found out later from the widow that the Professor had sent her out in search of a "beautiful glove."

  At the table that evening, Root and I had done our best to behave as though nothing had happened. After all, the fact that the Professor had forgotten us in less than ten minutes wasn't necessarily cause for concern. We started the party as planned. We had lots of experience dealing with the Professor's memory problems. We would simply adapt to the new situation and cope as best we could.

  And yet, something had changed, and, like the cake, I couldn't stop noticing the difference. The more I tried to convince myself there was nothing to worry about, the more troubled I became. But I couldn't let it spoil the party. We laughed and ate to our hearts' content, and talked about prime numbers and Enatsu and the Tigers winning the pennant.

  The Professor was delighted to be celebrating an eleven-year-old's birthday. He treated this simple party as though it were an important rite, and I thought of how precious the day of Root's birth was to me, too.

  Late that night, as I thought back over our celebration, I traced my finger over Euler's formula, careful not to smudge the soft pencil lines. I could feel with my fingertip the elegant curl of the legs on the π, the certainty and strength of the dot on the i, the decisive way the 0 had been joined at the top.

  The game dragged on, and the Tigers missed several chances to end it. I listened through the twelfth, the thirteenth, and the fourteenth innings, unable to shake the nagging feeling that it should have been over a while ago. It was just one run, but they couldn't get it across home plate. The moon rose full and midnight was approaching.

  He didn't know much about presents, but the Professor had a genius for receiving them. The expression on his face when Root gave him the Enatsu card was something neither of us will ever forget. He untied the ribbon and looked at the card for a moment. Then he looked up and tried to say something, but his lips just trembled as he held the card to his chest.

  The Tigers never did manage to score that run. They stopped the game after fifteen innings, ruling it a tie. They had been at it for six hours and twenty-six minutes.

  On Sunday, two days after the party, the Professor moved into a long-term care facility. His sister-in-law called to tell us.

  "This is very sudden, isn't it?" I said.

  "Actually, we've been planning it for some time. We were just waiting for a bed to open up at the hospital," she said.

  "I realize we stayed past working hours the other night. This wouldn't have anything to do with that, would it?"

  "No," she said, quite calmly. "I'm not upset about that at all. I knew it would be his last evening with you. But I'm sure you must have noticed what was happening." I wasn't sure what to say. "His eighty-minute tape has broken. His memory no longer goes beyond 1975, not even for a minute."

  "I'd be happy to go to the hospital to look after him."

  "That won't be necessary. They'll take good care of him.... Besides," she said, "I'll be there. You see, my brother-in-law can never remember you, but he can never forget me."

  The institution was a forty-minute bus ride from town, behind an abandoned airport. From the windows of the visitor's lounge you could see the cracks in the runway and the weeds growing on the roof of the hangar—and beyond, a thin strip of sea. On clear days, the waves glittered in the sun like a band of light stretched across the horizon.

  Root and I went out to see the Professor every month or so. On Sunday mornings we would pack a basket of sandwiches and catch the bus. We would talk awhile in the lounge and then go out on the terrace for our picnic. On warm days, the Professor and Root would play catch on the lawn in fro
nt of the hospital, and then we'd have tea and talk some more. The bus home was just before two o'clock.

  Often the widow was there as well. She would usually leave us alone with the Professor and go off to do some shopping for him, but sometimes she joined in our conversation and even brought out sweets to have with our tea. She had settled quietly into her role as the one person on earth who shared the Professor's memories.

  These visits continued for some years, until the Professor's death. Root played baseball—always second base—through middle school and high school, and in college, until he injured his knee and had to give it up. And I worked as a housekeeper for the Akebono Housekeeping Agency. During all those years, even after Root was old enough to grow a mustache, in the Professor's eyes he remained a small boy in need of protection. And when the Professor could no longer reach high enough, Root would bend over so the Professor could rub his head.

  The Professor's suit never changed. The notes, however, having lost their usefulness, fell off one by one. The one I had rewritten and replaced so many times, the one that read "My memory lasts only eighty minutes," disappeared eventually; and the portrait of me with the square root sign faded and crumbled away.

  In their place, the Professor wore a new decoration: the Enatsu card we had given him. The widow had made a hole in the plastic sleeve and run a cord through it, so the Professor could have it hanging around his neck.

  Root never came to visit without the glove the Professor had given him. And if their games of catch were less than brisk, they could not have enjoyed them more. Root tossed the ball gently for the Professor, and no matter where the return went, Root did his best to run it down. The widow and I would sit on the lawn nearby. Even after Root's hands had grown and the glove no longer fit, he continued to use it, claiming that a tight glove was good for a second baseman since it allowed him to handle the ball quickly and send it on its way to first. The leather faded and the edges frayed, and the label had long since torn off. But you had only to slip your hand inside it to feel the shape of Root's palm worn into the glove.

  Our last visit to the Professor was in the autumn of the year Root turned twenty-two.

  "Did you know that you can divide all the prime numbers greater than 2 into two groups?" He was sitting in a sunny spot, pencil in hand. There was no one else in the lounge and the people who passed by the door from time to time seemed far away. We listened carefully to the Professor. "If n is a natural number, then any prime can be expressed as either 4n + 1 or 4n - 1. It's always one or the other."

  "All of those numbers, those infinite primes, can all be divided into two groups?"

  "Take 13, for example ..."

  "That would be 4 × 3 + 1," Root said.

  "That's right. And 19?"

  "4 × 5 - 1."

  "Exactly!" The Professor nodded. "And there's more to it: the numbers in the first group can always be expressed as the sum of two squares, but those in the second can never be."

  "So, 13 = 22 + 32."

  "Precisely!" said the Professor. His joy had little to do with the difficulty of the problem. Simple or hard, the pleasure was in sharing it with us.

  "Root passed the qualifying exam to become a middle school teacher. Next spring, he'll begin teaching mathematics." I could hardly contain my pride as I made my announcement. The Professor sat up to hug Root, but his arms were frail and trembling. Root bent down to embrace him, the Enatsu card hanging between them.

  The sky is dark, the spectators and the scoreboard are in shadow. Enatsu stands alone on the mound under the stadium lights. The windup. The pitch. Beneath the visor of his cap, his eyes follow the ball, willing it over the plate and into the catcher's mitt. It is the fastest one he has ever thrown. And I can just see the number on the back of his pin-striped uniform. The perfect number 28.