The Mathematician’s Shiva (11 page)

“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.”

“I
t’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.”

“Yes, that’s right. He would never admit it, but he had the mind of a mathematician.”

“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.

For my mother, it was the one-two punch of those deaths that knocked her back. My aunt had been born in a Polish partisan encampment during the war, but her family was from a
dorf
not far from my mother’s hometown. They were like sisters, those two, and over the years had developed their own private language. I remember well listening to their mixture of Yiddish and Polish as they sat at the kitchen table drinking tea.

My aunt was a social creature in ways my mother could never be. She lived in the here and now, and was almost always impossibly optimistic about the future of mankind. When I was in my teens, I started to read Chekhov and noticed his fondness for including a female character in plays and stories like
The Three Sisters
’ Irina, someone who believed with every bit of her being, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the future would bring a better world. I thought, “Oh, Chekhov maybe had an aunt like mine.” He could have, for all I know, but more than likely Irina was a stand-in for Chekhov himself. My aunt was joyful, her presence made others instantly feel better about themselves, and she died too young.

When my aunt died, we lost our little good luck charm, although Bruce, once you scratch away his hip exterior and stupid French cigarettes, is like his mother in a lot of ways. Aunt Zloteh always had such consistent
goyishe mazel
that when she came back from the doctor with her diagnosis of cancer, we, a family that always defers to rational science, were half convinced that the doctors were completely wrong. Maybe if my aunt had lived a good many years, my mother wouldn’t have been so devastated by the death of her father at a naturally ripe age. But nature rarely gives us convenient respites, and tragic events, just like celebrations, seem to get bunched together.

“I wish Rachela would have believed in the afterlife,” my father said. “She would have been comforted a bit by thinking she was going to join those two.”

“They were a good trio. They understood each other.”

“It’s true. But I’ll tell you this. I’m not going anytime soon. I swear I’m going to hang around and torture you for another ten years at least.”

“You’re moving to Tuscaloosa?” I didn’t know if his brand of torture could be conducted over a long distance.

“You’ve got to be kidding. It’s too warm down there.”

“You’ve never been. How would you know?”

“I’m not an idiot. I don’t have to visit. All I have to do is look at Weather dot com. I don’t know how you can do any decent work in such a climate.”

“It’s true, you can’t ski there.”

“How long has it been since you’ve put on a pair of skis, anyway?” My father looked genuinely curious as to what my answer would be.

“Downhill? Two years ago, maybe.”

“No, not downhill. Any idiot can be hauled like a garbage can up a mountain just so he can let gravity slide him down. I mean up and down both. On a cold clear day.”

“Cross-country? Forever.”

“I’m going to take you out on a pair of skis again. I still went out with your mother, you know, when she was sick. I didn’t think it was a good idea, actually. But she insisted. She needed to think clearly.”

“Math still?”

“A little. She thought mostly about other things. Family history. You.”

“I’m a grown man. I live eight hundred miles away. I’m not a well-posed problem.”

“A mother still worries. Always.”

“And a father?”

“No, not me. I don’t worry about you. I raised you. You grew up. My biological purpose on this planet ended a long time ago. And you, your biological purpose. You didn’t follow through on that.”

“I did. At least one time.”

“Not that I can see. Not that anyone in your family can see.” My father gave me the look of a scold.

“It’s true. I let my
nakhes
slip away. But your biological purpose seems to be quite intact given the way you still chase after skirts.”

“That’s different. That has nothing to do with my biological purpose. It’s for pleasure.”

“Mistakes happen. Those little guys can still swim. Even at your age.” The thought of him fathering a child made me panic a bit.

“No, they can’t. Not for twenty years.”

“What? You never told me.”

“Why would I tell you? Is it a requirement in this country that a father and son engage in locker room conversation?”

“It hurt?”

“What? The surgery?”

“Yes, the snipping. They say you get elephant balls for a few days after.” I shouldn’t have been taunting my father, but I couldn’t help it.

“A lovely image you’ve just conjured up. This isn’t my kind of conversation. You know it isn’t.”

“True. I didn’t come here to discuss your fertility, anyway.”

“So why did you come?”

“I need to lay down the law with these idiots. I don’t want tomorrow to turn into a circus.”

“You can’t control these cockroaches. You know that. Your mother’s death has been like turning on a light in an apartment bathroom at night. It’s making these crazy people scurry around furiously.”

“I’m still going to lay down the law. Ollie’s rounding them all up. We’re going to meet in Room B102.”

“I don’t know if you can fit them all in there.” My father seemed surprised by my resolve.

“Ollie says it seats 350.”

“All those great minds. Not a one of them with a milligram worth of common sense. You really think you can make them behave?”

“I’m going to try in a half hour.”

“I was going to say it’s your funeral, but that would be in bad taste, I know.”

“I need the keys to Mom’s office. I need to figure out what I’m going to say to these
szalency.
”

“They keep trying to get in there. They think there is some great secret to be discovered.” He didn’t hide his disgust.

“You been in there lately?”

“No.”

“Maybe there is. You never know.”

“I know,” my father said as he tossed me the key. “There’s nothing there.”

My mother and father had offices on different floors. It had always been so, even before Van Vleck Hall had been erected. The place was showing its wear, I noticed. It was as if deferred maintenance were a requirement for running a modern public university. I walked into my mother’s office and sensed that no one had been inside for weeks at least.

I could see the dust in the air, visible in the rays of light that came through the slits in the blinds. I walked to the windows, turned the plastic rod, not surprisingly the same make of plastic rod as in my own office, and looked outside for a bit.

My mother’s desk was filled with piles of research papers and books checked out of the library. She had a thing about file cabinets, absolutely hated them. There was something about having a metal or wood case filled with papers that she found offensive. Why? I don’t know. It was the same with raisins. It’s just how she was, and the fact of the matter is that when you achieve a certain level of fame and notoriety—even in the obscure world of mathematics—you’re given license to act on your whims and neuroses with abandon.

In her office, my mother had filled her open-wall shelves with orange faux–leather bound banker’s boxes. The boxes were in turn filled with copies of papers, works in progress, and letters. One of these boxes was on her desk. It turned out that my father had been wrong about the absence of secrets in my mother’s office. At least I was surprised. The box was labeled,
Papers of A.K.
A for Alexander, my legal first name. K for Karnokovitch.

I knew the research papers contained in that box, of course. I never sent her copies of my writing. She never asked for them, either. But here they were, Xeroxed copies of my papers, the ones where I was first author, at any rate. One of the papers had been pulled out, and I could see my mother’s handwriting on the margins. She wasn’t just collecting my papers. She was analyzing them.

We never talked about my work, although she would show up sometimes when I gave visiting lectures in the atmospheric sciences department at Wisconsin. One time by happenstance we were both giving lectures at the University of Arizona, and she suggested that we come to each other’s talks. I remember my mother walking into the cinder-block lecture hall of the atmospheric sciences department with a troupe of skinny young male mathematicians, pathetic bodyguards of a sort. I looked at her in the middle of the lecture hall as I began and smiled. I knew why mother had brought her Arizona colleagues. She was
kvelling
, plain and simple.

Many years later, when my mother was already sick, I gave a talk in Wisconsin, and she again appeared. There was again a troupe of mathematicians with her, but this time their purpose was practical. They were making sure she was OK. In the middle of my lecture, she bolted from the room and went out a side door, only to show up again, her makeup redone, ten minutes later. I asked her about it after the lecture. “I had to throw up,” she said matter-of-factly.

Did I
kvell
at my mother’s lectures? Of course, or as they say in my home state, you betcha. She was more than just a mother to me, just like she was more than just a wife to my father and more than just a sister to my uncle. She was our source of pride, the standard-bearer of our family’s
yikhes
, our family’s bloodline. If anyone doubted that our gene pool was worth continuing for another millennium, we could always point to her. The world was lucky to have my mother. I was lucky to be her son. You betcha, indeed.

But getting into the
kishkes
of one of my papers—this one had been written in 1982—was about something more than just
kvelling
. She was using my work for something. I thought of Einstein and his progeny. His son Hans, like me, didn’t even try to follow in the footsteps of his father (and mother) but ran away at an oblique angle to become a fluid dynamicist. He studied the motion of water in rivers. The great Einstein went to the trouble of doing a bit of research in his son’s field, and even wrote a paper on the topic of why rivers meander. Perhaps my mother was trying to do something similar. Whatever the reason she was looking at my work, the recognition that she was in such close intellectual proximity to me lifted my heart, and I forgot, for a moment, my grief.

Mourning. Who can possibly be good at such an awful endeavor? Your heart really does feel heavy. That’s not some poetic metaphor. Your skin feels absent of moisture. Your breath is shallow and you literally ache as you try to take more air into your lungs. Everything slows down and your senses dull. It’s a coping mechanism, I guess, and a good one. Who wants to be aware during such a time? Your mind, if it were fully alert, would send you the images and feelings of a real-life horror show.

I just needed to get through tomorrow in one piece, I thought. I needed to recite one speech at the funeral, and I didn’t really care if it was anything close to perfect. I needed to make sure these mathematicians would be kind enough to sit in one place for one hour and keep their mouths shut.

I walked into Room B102, and there they were. The mathematicians. I knew many of them by sight. Ollie walked up to me, and somehow, the sight of his familiar shiny bald head made me feel better. I had known this man for forever. We’d even played in Little League together.