It was 1957. I was eight years old. My mother was on the phone in the kitchen with Kolmogorov himself. Who knows how many Soviet agents were listening along? My mother complained bitterly about being usurped, about being unrecognized for a major contribution to solving this problem that she made in 1947 but had not published. Why hadn’t she published it? It wasn’t close to the full solution. In my mother’s opinion, no proof was worth publishing unless it was substantially completed. Kolmogorov knew what my mother had done. He passed her partial solution on to Zhelezniak, who finished her work. In my mother’s opinion, a nineteen-year-old boy was taking credit for everything because that’s the way the Soviets wanted it. It was a good piece of propaganda for them. “This will never happen again,” she swore. “My work will not be stolen. Never.” I didn’t hear the other half of the conversation from Kolmogorov, but I could tell that he was trying to console her. His efforts weren’t working.
My mother had other enemies as well, although in the balance, she had many more friends. Her warmth and coldness were without pattern. Of course, she was warm to me nearly always. I was her flesh and blood. She remained warm to my father as well, even after they separated. I think this was partly in recognition of his having to deal with her difficult nature for so many years. Her brother and her father, too, she always held dear, as well as Bruce and Anna. But with strangers, you never knew how my mother would react. She would make snap judgments, and once those judgments were made, they did not change. A person was wonderful or they were an idiot or selfish or amusing or creative. Everyone she met was put in a pigeonhole almost instantly. Emotional nuance? I don’t think she had time for it.
According to my mother, Vladimir Zhelezniak was an unrepentant thief. That he continued to excel in mathematics for decades following his solution of Hilbert’s thirteenth problem, just as she had following her solution to Hilbert’s fifteenth problem at a similar age, meant nothing.
My mother’s mercurial nature, I’m sure, added to her allure in the mathematical world. She wasn’t just a mathematical genius but one about whom stories could be told. There were lots of them. Here’s one that involves Zhelezniak. It took place in 1968 in France, a crazy time of student riots. Nowadays, when you go to the University of Paris and notice its proto-IKEA tackiness and ugliness, you can blame it on that terrible year. After the riots, French muckamucks quietly made sure that any new parts of the university would have campus layouts designed to make it difficult for students to congregate in large numbers.
The unruly demonstrations in Paris and elsewhere in the 1960s and 1970s were predictably accompanied by a period of overheated sexual behavior throughout the West. My mother found the sexual revolution to be crass and tasteless. It was all too mechanical and depressing for her. She brought along a female Ph.D. student to give a talk at the Paris conference. Part of my mother’s job, or at least she thought it was part of her job, was to make sure that her students didn’t do something stupid at these conferences that they would later regret. “They should have ‘premorse,’ but not remorse,” was how she put it.
Zhelezniak approached the Ph.D. student to compliment her on her presentation. Perhaps he was trying to do more. Who knows really, but when my mother saw Zhelezniak with her student at a table during a break in the proceedings, she seethed. I’ve seen that look in her eyes. I can well imagine her grimace as she looked around the room. Her eyes spotted the carafes of coffee in the center table—bad coffee can be found in France as easily as it can be found elsewhere—and her plan immediately came into focus.
She grabbed a carafe, walked over to them, and asked Zhelezniak if he would like more coffee. Perhaps this was the first time my mother had said a word directly to Zhelezniak in eleven years. Zhelezniak held out his cup. My mother promptly dumped the entire pot into his lap.
Acts like this—one great mind dumping hot coffee into the lap of an adversary—can be, and usually are, remembered for decades in academic circles. The truth was that she hated the notoriety caused by her flare-ups.
“Everyone thinks their children are special,” my grandfather once said to me. “They delude themselves about their sons and daughters, their beauty, their minds.” He said that in Russia people thought he was deluding himself about Rachela, who to most simply looked lost, absent from the world. But he knew. “I could see her mind working like a machine,” he said. “When Grozslev came to our little hovel and began to give your mother lessons, his face that first day had such a surprised look. ‘What have we here?’ That look said it all.”
“We do not come from stupid people,” my grandfather would sometimes say to me when he sensed that I was showing signs of “being an American,” which to him was any sign that I was relaxing my mind and resolve. That is certainly true. Stupidity also was not present in any of my mother’s friends or admirers, at least when it came to mathematics. Some had talents in other realms as well. Music, of course. Painting and sculpture, too. Some were engaging conversationalists, and others managed to operate in the real world with ease and without a trace of overt strangeness, without giving away the fact that they were different.
“They’re here.” My father called me from his office. “All of them. They are crawling around the building like giant ants.”
“Why don’t you leave? Go home. You can come here if you want.”
“I have work to do. Serious work. I need an office. A chalkboard. A desk. Something austere and uncomfortable. I’ve shut the door. Locked it. Those bastards keep knocking. They know I’m here. Some want to get into your mother’s office. They want the key.”
“Tell Marie not to give them access. No way. Ollie, too.”
“I know, I know. I called to tell you about Otrnlov. I heard he’s coming to the house. He’s walking over right now.”
Konstantin Otrnlov. It was a name I knew well. From a theoretical standpoint, it’s perhaps expected that a great mathematician would attract a crazy acolyte or two. As a practical matter, these acolytes can be at best a pain in the ass and at worst dangerous. Konstantin Otrnlov wasn’t sane, was devoted to my mother, and you never knew just what he might do.
Otrnlov had come to the United States from Latvia in 1978, and while he had been unable to obtain a position at an American university, he eventually earned a tidy sum of money with a carpet business in New Jersey. It was enough to allow him to return part-time to his love, mathematics. His admiration for my mother turned into an obsession in about 1990. He proposed marriage to my mother. He mailed her jewelry, which she would promptly return. He even bought her a car, which he tried to give her at a conference. One summer he rented a house across the street from my mother, living there when he wasn’t in New Jersey. My mother ignored him. He was never let into our house.
My mother viewed Otrnlov’s obsession as harmless until 1998, when he apparently anointed himself protector of all things Karnokovitch and physically attacked a mathematician at a conference for the sin of asking my mother a question that Otrnlov deemed hostile. Otrnlov was not a small man. I’m sure those blows hurt.
“You be careful with him,” my father said. “He has some ridiculous idea that the proof is in the house. Anyone else home?”
“Bruce is, yes. Anna is visiting an old friend.”
“Tell Bruce to get out of there fast.”
“He’s in the tub trying to warm up.”
“Otrnlov’s ideas. I’ve heard some of them. After Otrnlov leaves, throw Bruce out of the fucking tub, give him the keys to the car, and tell him to go somewhere, anywhere. I am not kidding.”
“Anna has the car.”
“Yob tvoiu mat. If Otrnlov asks about Bruce or Shlomo, tell him you don’t know anything. You don’t know where they are. Tell him that Bruce took off and went somewhere. Do not tell Otrnlov that Bruce is in the house. Understand?”
“Why?”
“I don’t have time to explain it. I need to get back to wor
k. But Ollie knows.”
As my father hung up, I looked out the window and waited. It was a twenty-minute walk from Van Vleck Hall to our house. He’d arrive soon enough.
Otrnlov did love my mother. It was a deranged love, certainly, but he had come to Madison to honor her. With the others I was beginning to think that the hoopla was less about my mother than it was about the field of mathematics itself.
Imagine mathematics as a canvas where every mathematician of worth fills the missing white spaces. Hilbert came along in the twentieth century to do something no one had done well before. He assessed the canvas of mathematics and identified what white space was left. Since Hilbert, much of that white space had already been filled by both those painting details with the smallest of brushes, people like my father, and those who filled in the bigger blank spaces, people like Kolmogorov, Zhelezniak, and my mother.
Eventually, the canvas would be full, essentially complete in all its beauty. What would be left would be trivial. Mathematics had already gotten to the point where the canvas looked beautiful. My mother knew it. “It’s a good thing I came when I did,” she said. “Since the 1970s, what have been the discoveries? Not much.” Partly people were coming to honor my mother, sure, but they were also coming out of nostalgia for a time when mathematics was still great, when one highly skilled and gifted mind could do so many remarkable and exquisite things.
At the time of my mother’s death, Otrnlov reportedly was working on a biography about her. I knew that he had gone through each and every article and word my mother had ever published. I’d heard that he’d wanted to write about my mother’s personal life as well, but if so, he hadn’t contacted me yet. I knew that when he did I wouldn’t cooperate.
Otrnlov walked up to my mother’s house in a New York Giants parka. A fedora covered his still-full head of hair. His thick mustache had turned completely gray since the last time I had seen him. I swear I could smell him on the other side of the door, which I wasn’t going to open. I waited for a knock.
“Otrnlov. Get the fuck out of here,” I shouted.
“Sashaleh, is that you?”
“Yes, of course. Who else? Now get the fuck out of here and don’t come back.”
“I just came to say hello to you, Sashaleh. Your father said I should come by.”
“Get out. I’m going to call the police.”
“Your cousin is here, too?”
“No.”
“I’d like to talk to him. Where is he?”
“Crazy man. I’m not going to tell you where Bruce is.”
“Sashaleh, this is no way to treat a friend of the family, someone who loved your mother as much as anyone. I’ve come all this way, ignoring important business, to pay my respects.”
“Tomorrow at the funeral, I’m going to have a cop put you against the wall and have you spread your legs like a whore as he pats you down. If he finds anything, a gun, a knife, so much as a nail clippers, I’m going to have him haul you away. Understand?”
“Yes, I understand, Sashaleh. I don’t have anything. I just came to say good-bye to the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century. That’s all. Just to say good-bye.”
“I’m not opening up the casket, either. Not for anyone. Now you get the fuck away from here and don’t come back.”
“I understand, Sashaleh, but I do have a small request.”
“You don’t get requests.”
“Please, Sashaleh. I knew your mother for so long. She is like family to me. Dear family.”
“No, crazy man. She was not like family to you.”
“She was. You can’t deny it.”
“I don’t care what I can and can’t deny.”
“I would like to give a short speech at the funeral, Sashaleh. Your father said it would be OK.”
“No. It’s not OK. No speech. No nothing. You come to the ceremony. You listen. You pray. You leave. The burial is private. Understand, crazy man?”
“This is not right. I did so much for your dear mother. I loved her.”
“Get away from the door and go back to the university or I’ll call the cops.”
“Your mother would be crying if she heard you right now, Sashaleh. I can see her tears, I swear.”
“I’m calling the cops on my cell.”
“Don’t call anyone. It’s OK. I’ll leave. I’ll see you tomorrow, Sashaleh.”
“OK. Tomorrow. Now get the fuck away from here and don’t come back.” I could sense Otrnlov turning around and moving away from the door with his plodding steps. I called Ollie on my cell as I, through the living room curtains, watched Otrnlov walk along the sidewalk and thought, good riddance. Ollie gave me the lowdown on Otrnlov’s crazy ideas.
I went upstairs to see Bruce, who was in an old satin bathrobe of my father’s, reading a manuscript in my mother’s bed.
“What was that about?”
“What was it about? Maybe I just saved your life.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
“I’m not joking. I need to find a picture of the guy who was at the door just now.”
“The one you were shouting at?”
“Yeah, that one. He thinks you have a copy of the proof my mother supposedly solved, and you’re hiding it until you make a movie about it.”
“Oh, he is crazy. This is amusing.” Bruce was grinning.
“It’s not amusing, Bruce. This is serious. The guy, his name is Otrnlov. I don’t know what he is capable of doing. But his head is full of loose screws.”
“A movie about your mother wouldn’t sell, you know.” The following year, when the movie A Beautiful Mind came out, Bruce would change his opinion about the prospects of a successful biopic about my mother. On this topic, maybe Otrnlov wasn’t so crazy after all.
“I’m going to print out a picture for you. Don’t get near Otrnlov. Keep your distance.”
“You look bad, Sashaleh.”
“My mother died. How am I supposed to look?”
“No, not grieving bad. You look angry and upset, bad. I haven’t seen you like this in a long time.”
“I am angry. I am upset. My mother dies and I have to deal with these idiots.”
“It’s entertainment, Sasha. You know that. We’re going to put on a show for them. Make a good strudel. Then we can be ourselves.”
“Well, there have to be rules about this strudel. I’m going to campus. I’m laying down the law. You think I stand a chance of getting through to them?”
Bruce paused before he said a word, something uncharacteristic of him. He tilted his head and looked upward. Then and there, he reminded me a bit of Pascha the parrot when someone she liked was approaching her cage.
“Not a chance in hell,” he said. “I don’t get why you’d even try.”
CHAPTER 14
Laying Down the Law
“It’s been a long time since we’ve had to deal with such a thing,” my father said. I was in his office, having walked in a rage from my mother’s home to Van Vleck Hall. A utilitarian tower built during the boom years in state funding of the university, the building was named after an alum and former faculty member who went on to MIT and won a Nobel Prize in physics. Nowadays, new buildings on state campuses like Wisconsin and Alabama tend to be architectural wonders funded by and named for near-billionaire alums who believe that, through their donations to their alma maters, they will leave monuments to their amazing monetary success that will last as long as the pyramids of Giza. The truth is that, more than likely, one hundred years or so into the future, their campus buildings will be torn down and replaced by something newer and fancier funded by near-trillionaires (since being a billionaire by then will be equivalent to being a mere mortal millionaire today). Thank god no one tells them this.
“Twenty years,” I said. “A little longer. That’s when Zaydeh Aaron died.”
“Probably so. But that wasn’t true for Aunt Zloteh,” I said.
“Oh no, not her.” My father smiled. Even my father, with the natural eye of a critic, always viewed my late aunt with a positive glow.
One of the advantages or disadvantages, depending on your view I suppose, of coming from a small family is that hardly anyone dies and you rarely mourn. I say it depends on your point of view, because births and weddings, happy occurrences, are infrequent as well. But grief always hits hard and somehow lingers longer than exultation in your mind and heart, or at least it does with me.
My aunt and grandfather died over a two-month period when I was in my late twenties. That year of funerals was a hard time for my mother. It was during a year of cicadas, and they were everywhere at my aunt’s funeral, crunching under the soles of shoes. With the death of my aunt, my uncle Shlomo, for a time, became a broken man. It was the only period in my life when I saw him defeated by anything. After the funeral he went into a drunk that lasted a year and a half. A trio of Greek brothers, former owners of a couple of unsuccessful dive bars in the area who Shlomo had hired years before, held his business together.
Two months later, when my grandfather, walking like he always did in the morning to pick up his copy of the Wall Street Journal at Mac’s, had an aneurysm and instantly died, I think my uncle barely noticed. In fact, the day of that funeral, I had to go to his house, sober him up a bit, throw him in the shower, and help him get dressed. He said not a word during the entire ceremony. When he took a shovel of dirt to the casket, I looked at his ashen face, literally gray. It was if his capillaries had retreated deep within his skin, and I thought that he would soon follow both of them, my grandfather in that deep hole, my aunt no more than ten feet away.
The Mathematician’s Shiva Page 11
