The Mathematician’s Shiva (13 page)

I
can tell you the exact moment I became interested in meteorology. I was eight years old. It was in June during a year with an early summer when even Wisconsin was hot and muggy. Moisture clung to your skin, and at night thunderstorms lit up the sky.

We are, as a family, not fond of hot weather, although of course I changed my opinion on this subject as an adult. My mother was convinced that the heat fouled your brain. She used her summers to do things that didn’t require much thought and were strictly for pleasure. For a while, in the good Russian tradition, we had an American version of a dacha, a little cabin on a lake about one hour north of Madison. Every summer we would haul up there for a month or two. My father would abandon his suits and ties, and would even forgo his comb-over as he took dips in the lake or went fishing in our little rowboat. My grandfather would sit at the kitchen table and do his annual dusting and cleaning of our investment portfolio. My mother would fry up the bluegill and perch my father and I caught, although my father was almost always far more successful than I was.

There is a Russian phrase that my father was fond of that is difficult to give life to in English,
bez truda ne vytaschish i rybku iz pruda
. It takes work to pull a fish out of the water. I suppose it’s the equivalent of no pain, no gain. But according to my father, this phrase isn’t really talking about pain and it’s not talking about fishing the way Americans think of it. No, it’s about diving deep to find a carp in one of those murky steppe lakes left by glaciers ten thousand years ago. You have to feel with your hands on the lake bottom without sight of what you are looking for, and hold your breath all the while. Then, somehow, upon feeling that familiar slick skin in the slimy muck, you need to reach for the gill of the fish and literally haul him up with you to the surface. That is indeed work, and I think it has everything to do with scientific discovery. You have to know what you are seeking, are often blind, and have to rely on the feel that comes with experience. Even then, when you finally have something tangible in your grasp, you still have a lot of work and struggle. Immigrants to this country and their children tend to understand this. Americans? Not really. It’s why they don’t often excel in science.

We were fishing, my father and I, on one of those unbearably hot days when in the afternoon the clouds formed into thunderheads. My father insisted that we continue to do exactly what we had started to do in the morning, weather be damned. As I was casting, I saw a tornado start to form in the distance. At first it was a little gray wisp high in the air, but then it lengthened. Finally its tip hit the water. It was as menacingly elegant as a cobra.

“
Papa, smotri
,” I said.

“Oh my, this I’ve never seen.”

“What is it?”

“Tornado, but on the water.”

The sky was changing color by the instant, turning from ash gray to olive green. I should have been scared, but instead I was entranced. Something almost as powerful as human love filled me. The wind whipped my T-shirt as I watched the funnel in the distance. I barely helped to gather up our fishing gear.

Right then and there I wanted to know everything about how tornadoes formed. I wanted to know how air and moisture organized in this way. Even today, I think it’s remarkable that it does so. What starts out as a small disturbance cascades under the right and oh so rare conditions. The odds of this cascade of events happening are minuscule, and we know this because little wisps of moisture and air are present with us all the time.

Tornadoes are a good metaphor for how bad things happen in our lives. They build from small disturbances that usually don’t mean a thing and almost always dissipate. But somehow one particular random bad event attracts others, and all of them together grow and attract more nasty stuff. Once it gets up to a critical size, the odds of it growing even larger are no longer remote.

I drove to my uncle’s house and thought of Otrnlov and the out-of-control shiva. I walked inside. Otrnlov was sprawled on my uncle’s dining room carpet, unconscious.

“What do you suggest we do with this
szaleniec,
Sashaleh?” My uncle looked at me as if I might actually have some useful contribution to solving the problem at hand.

“You’re the one with the practical ideas in this family.”

“Usually, yes.”

“And this isn’t like usual?”

“No, it isn’t. I have enough to deal with with Cynthia. You have to deal with him.”

“Where’s Cynthia?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere in here, I think. I didn’t hear her car. You know, I should have never married that woman. But she has a reason to be upset now.” Cynthia was American-born. My uncle had built this house for her. It was an effort at building a life completely different than anything he had experienced before. Like most efforts at reinvention, it was a failure. You could say that my entire family had reinvented itself by coming to America, but it wouldn’t be true. We simply came here and did exactly as before, more or less. America accepted us, unbridled and untamed. “His name is Otrnlov, you say?”

“Yeah, Konstantin Otrnlov.”

“A man walks up to my house, my wife answers, and he starts threatening her. I hear the shouting, see his hands on Cynthia. He’s lucky to still be alive.”

“What did you hit him with?”

“Baseball bat. I always keep a few around. I’m in the liquor business. You never know who’s going to come to the door.”

“You knock him out then and there?”

“No. I got him off Cynthia first. I tried to get him to explain himself. He talked. Then he reached for something in his jacket. I thought it might be a gun. That’s when I hit him.”

“Did he actually have a gun?”

“Sort of. A staple gun,” my uncle said, and pointed to the loaded “weapon” on the dining room table.

“He was going to shoot you with a staple gun?”

“Don’t laugh. You could blind someone with that.”

“He’s out cold. Thank god he’s still breathing.”

“The bat is metal. What do you expect? Not all crazy people have crazy strength, you know. That’s just in the movies. He was drunk, screaming mostly in Russian but nothing I could understand. I thought it was some crazy dialect I’d never heard.”

“Anna said that.”

“He was using all kinds of Latvian words, it turns out. Anna couldn’t understand him either, but she could tell he was from Latvia from his accent.”

“He’s not saying anything anymore. He was looking for Bruce, probably. I should have called you.”

“Yes, you should have. Definitely should have. And now this
szaleniec
is your responsibility.”

“I could call the police.” Even I knew this was a lousy idea.

“This Otrnlov have a criminal record? He’s done this before?”

“I don’t think so, no. He hit another mathematician once, but that guy didn’t press charges.”

“So what are they going to do with him? And we have a funeral tomorrow. We have more important things to do than deal with this Otrnlov and cops.”

“I’ll call his daughter. Have her retrieve him.”

“She nearby?”

“New Jersey.”

“That’s not nearby. That’s a day away even by plane.” My uncle sighed. “This family is hopeless. OK, we switch. You deal with Cynthia. She always liked you pretty well. Probably she likes you more than she likes me right now. I’ll deal with Otrnlov.”

“You sure?”

“You find Cynthia. She’s in here somewhere. I know it. It’s too cold for her to go out. I’ll get this Otrnlov taken care of today and have his daughter pick him up tomorrow. You know her number?” My uncle took hold of his cell phone, and eagerly waited for me to give him the ten digits that he could enter into his little phone bank.

My uncle had met Cynthia in Florida when he was on vacation. She was from Dallas, Texas, and on a business trip. An interior decorator twenty years younger than my uncle, Cynthia was about to be married to a longtime friend of her mother’s family. According to my uncle, she was not particularly looking forward to this marriage, or at least she was getting cold feet. My uncle, a confident, tall dark man, came into her life and offered her an exotic alternative.

Finding anyone in my uncle’s house was not easy. The walls were thick, the hallways long, and any name shouted out would not likely be heard by its intended target. When my uncle built this house, a Roman library–inspired home of five thousand square feet, it was one of the most ostentatious in Madison. But over the space of a few short years, it became accepted as somewhat tasteful in comparison to the newer, monstrous, Disney-inspired castles that were being built on the fringes of town.

I opened the door into the greenhouse. Now, dear reader, don’t try to read symbolism into this. Cynthia Czerneski was in the greenhouse, yes, but she is not a hothouse flower from the South trying desperately to survive the cold of Wisconsin. This story is not a Tennessee Williams play. Cynthia Czerneski does not depend on the kindness of strangers.

But here is some information about me. People do believe in my kindness, or at least women of a certain age do. I don’t understand it myself. Physically, I don’t possess any characteristics that could be associated with softness. I have a Dracula-like widow’s peak. My face is more or less blocklike. I am broad-shouldered and have the short, marchlike stride of a boxer. It’s as if I’m ready to do battle at any moment. If I were a woman, I would be suspicious, or maybe even scared of a man like me. Yet women talk to me all the damn time. On planes they show not the slightest hesitation to sit next to me. And they tend to open up and tell me things that no one should tell any stranger.

Perhaps because I had lived in the South for so many years, or because I was close to my uncle, or because of my improbably inviting aura, I was the one person in my family, aside from my uncle, with whom Cynthia actually talked. In the greenhouse she was tending to some orchids, the blooms large and delicate, when she noticed and turned to me.

“I’m sorry to hear about your mother,” Cynthia said.

“She had a good life. A little short. But really now, she didn’t get cheated.”

“I was there with her, you know. Just trying to help. But she didn’t want my help.”

“My mother was not easy to deal with, I know.”

“Sasha, she kicked me out. She was screaming at me. Swearing at me, telling me to get out. I’ve never, I mean, I was just trying to help.” Cynthia was crying, still next to the orchids, and I reached out and held her. She broke into full sobs, heaving against me. “It’s been so hard, so hard,” she said between the sobs.

“It’ll be OK, Cynthia. We’ll have the funeral tomorrow. We’ll sit shiva. We’ll get through this.”

“And then that man today. Screaming at me in a language I don’t understand. Shaking me. I thought I was going to die.”

“You’ve had a terrible day, it’s true.”

“I’ve tried to be a good wife. I really have. I tried to be like a good little sister to your mother, too. But these people. They expect me to know Russian and Polish. They expect so much of me.”

“We are difficult, I know.”

She let go of me and took a tissue to wipe away the tears. Cynthia was one of those people who simply could not look bad. Her face wouldn’t allow it. She always looked beautiful in some way. There in front of me, her beauty came not so much from her features but in the resolve that I could see building in her. I don’t think anyone in my family knew that Cynthia possessed inner strength.

“I can’t take this anymore. I sit in this house most days alone. It’s a lovely house, really. It’s just how I dreamed it would be. I worked on it, making it just so.”

“It is beautiful.”

“I know it is. But it’s almost as if I’ve built a prison for myself here. It’s cold, so cold in the winter. I’ve never gotten used to it. And the people. I shouldn’t complain. I’m not a complainer at all. But it’s not like at home. They’re as cold as the weather here.”

“It’s not like the South, you’re right.”

“You understand that. You know. I try to tell Shlomo, and he says people are people, the same everywhere. But it isn’t true. They aren’t the same. I really can’t live here anymore. I’ve never thought this way before. But something about that man today. I could have died. I don’t want to die here. I want to be where I belong.”

“Don’t do anything rash, please, Cynthia. You know my uncle loves you.”

“I haven’t told him anything, yet. But I will. It’s not something that just came to me. It’s just that today I understood what I’ve been feeling for a long time.”

“I’m sorry to hear.”

“You’ve been the only person nice to me in this whole family. No one else. They pretend I’m a joke. I’m not a joke! I’m a real person with real feelings.”

“We’ll have the funeral. Then we can all talk. Maybe you and I and Shlomo all together.”

“I’m not going to stay for the shiva, Sasha. I’m going home. I’ve already called my family. Already bought a ticket.”

I looked at Cynthia, her resolve and resignation so clear and open on her face, and thought of my own marriage. I knew why I had never married again. My family is hard on people, or at least unsuspecting people who believe in following their better angels. Hopeful, cheery women may be attracted to people like me or my uncle or my father because we know how to charm and say the right thing at the right time, and we are not without a high degree of confidence and resourcefulness. But ultimately we can break people and make them doubt what they have always felt to be true. We need strong women, case-hardened. Oh, Cynthia, Catherine, and all the other blithe female spirits in the world that we have flirted with and seduced, you should know we accept the savagery of the world with open arms. How come intelligent women can’t recognize this trait of ours instantly?

A
mericans expect to live forever. I’ve noticed how Americans deal with doctors and hospitals and how they spend money—sometimes the money of their insurance companies, and sadly, sometimes piles of their own—to try to extend their lives for a minute, hour, day, month, or year or two. They engage in a ridiculous attempt to deny their mortality.

I would expect people with such an optimistic—I should really say delusional, but I’m trying to be nice—vision of our lives on this planet to go into complete shock when the inevitable happens and a loved one dies. Their mourning should be profound, their grief total and consuming. But it isn’t so. Americans are, in fact, incredibly psychologically healthy—with not a small number of exceptions no doubt—when it comes to the death of loved ones. Of course, they feel terrible, but not usually in a wail out loud, scratch the skin off your cheeks, wear sackcloth and ashes kind of way. No, Americans tend to be quite sensible about this dealing with death business, far more sensible than they are about the business of actually dying. They feel loss for a year or two, but then somehow—and maybe this is just the optimistic spirit of America at work—they just pop back up again. They begin life anew with their face and eyes forward. I salute the American attitude toward mourning. I wish I possessed it, too.

It has now been almost a dozen years since my mother died. I can say without a doubt that I still have not fully recovered. I try to be a good American—I’m a citizen and patriot, after all—and look optimistically ahead. Indeed, I have much to do and much for which to be grateful, but how can one replace a mother? How can one replace someone you love who not only loves you in return, but also possesses a brain the size of the moon? I swear it would be easier for me to reconcile my loss if my mother had been the salt of the earth, an uneducated woman who nurtured me and encouraged me to go beyond her world and achieve something with the talents I had been given. I would still possess profound grief, but it would be the ordinary grief of a son. Instead, I have to live not only with the acute knowledge that I will never see my mother again, but I will also never again know anyone with that kind of intellect. I didn’t just observe that brain at work or obsess over it from a distance like Otrnlov. I was onstage with it. I interacted. I was part of that brain’s consciousness, sometimes too much so for my own comfort.

Maybe I’m writing these words because I still feel something profoundly missing. It’s true that I feel the spirit of my mother with me as I write this, and the fact is that it’s such a comfort, this feeling like she’s actually with me, that it’s becoming addicting. Too bad my mother’s life can’t be turned into a romantic-spy serial. Instead, this is the only book I will ever write about my mother. When it is done I will undoubtedly feel sad again now and then, weighed down by the loss of the woman who gave me life.

If you come from a country where people in the prime of their lives still die from pneumonia and tuberculosis with regularity, where a national leader murdered tens of millions of his own people and was still loved (and continues to be loved sixty years later), where death falls like rain every day, an inevitable unfortunate thing, where the average life expectancy of a male is younger than I am now (a comfortable, if a bit grumpy, middle age), then you know fully that you aren’t going to live forever. There is no way you can delude yourself. If a sickness comes—a little strange bump appears on your cheek, the result of too much sun as a child decades ago; or your eyes yellow and your complexion turns sallow—you know that there’s a good chance it will kill you. You are not so important that God, if there is one, will lower his hand of kindness in recognition of your plight. No miracles will be bestowed.

You might think that a people with such experiences and attitudes toward their mortality, depressingly realistic, would view the death of loved ones with a sad shrug and then go on, barely impacted by Death’s visits, since Death is such a frequent visitor, after all. But no, it seems to be quite the opposite. When the inevitable does happen, we break hard, or at least my family and its friends do. There is no other way possible.

We live here, we are Jewish, and we can usually pretend we are Americans, but when Death comes we might as well be in Moscow or Minsk. At Jewish American funerals the surviving family usually affixes a tastefully discreet, barely visible black ribbon on their dresses and coat lapels as a symbol of grief. In adherence to Jewish law, they take a blade and make a tiny, barely visible cut into the ribbon. I can’t fathom this approach. Why should mourning be tasteful? Why should we hide our loss?

I wasn’t going to wear some stupid torn ribbon. That said, I wasn’t going to ruin a perfectly good piece of clothing. I was sad and depressed, but still practical. I walked up to the attic of my mother’s house. Bruce shouted up the stairs as he left my mother’s room, “What are you doing?”

I knew what I was looking for. “I’m getting a tie to cut.”

“Grandpa Aaron’s ties are still there?”

“Hundreds of them. At least a few dozen here look like they could have been made this year.”

“I’m coming up.”

Vintage is not my cousin’s style, but still he was intrigued, if only because of nostalgia. “He did have a look,” Bruce said as he fingered the ties. “How many people can say that about their grandfather?”

“This one here is good.”

“Marshall Fields. Not bad. You’re going to cut it, right?”

“I’ll have the rabbi do it.”

“Seems a shame, really. It’s a good tie. Classic business look.” He seemed offended by the tie’s impending destruction.

“I think it closes a circle, in a way.”

“Saks. Wilkes Bashford. How did he get those?”

“Every town he visited, he bought some. That’s how he was.”

“I’ll take a few for a friend. He likes this sort of stuff. Do you mind, Sasha?”

“He was your
zaydeh
too, you know. We’ll have to clean this house out eventually.”

We are a people pathologically in love with mourning not only our deceased family members but our national heroes as well. Poets, mathematicians, philosophers, politicians, sports heroes, cosmonauts. I swear that the funeral is to Russia what baseball is to the United States, its national pastime. When Kolmogorov was buried in Moscow, people who couldn’t add single digits together without a struggle, much less devise a trivial mathematical proof, waited in a queue to see the great man at peace, clothed in a decent (for Russia at any rate), blue suit.

And what of the death of the truly widely known? Chekhov, understanding Russia’s love of mourning, said famously, “Once Tolstoy dies, everything will go to hell!” He was right. When Tolstoy did die, the tsar tried to blunt the efforts of all of Russia to turn Tolstoy’s funeral into a spiritual hajj. Trains to Tolstoy’s remote town of Yasnaya Polyana were canceled. This strategy backfired as people turned the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg into public funeral homes. They wailed over the death of the great man, and used the occasion to agitate for his political causes.

Perhaps only in Russia do people formalize grief to such a degree that national leaders are pickled for decades-long public display with nary a soul saying the obvious: What kind of sick and twisted nonsense is this? If you had achieved national visibility and you didn’t share this obsession, if you found it distasteful, or if you were simply a sourpuss, well then you tried your best to avoid it when it was your turn. The Nobel Prize–winning poet Joseph Brodsky was, in addition to being an outstanding talent whose poems had made him the equivalent of a rock star in Russia, a sourpuss of the first order. Though he had long left Russia for the United States, he wasn’t going to let even New York Russian émigrés turn his death into a circus of grief. No, he smartly chose to have his body flown far from the potential maddening crowd in the United States to Venice, Italy. Russians living in America were shut out. Those in Brodsky’s native land were left with the meager outlet of erecting a plaque at his home of thirty-three years in St. Petersburg.

In a flight of fancy before my mother died, I had actually thought of following Brodsky’s model. We could bury my mother in Israel, maybe even near the Mount of Olives grave of her
landsfrau
, the nineteenth-century mystic Maid of Ludmir. But the fact is that Israeli mathematicians are as impossible and nosey as those in America.

I didn’t mention this crazy thought to my mother. I knew what she wanted. “Kowalevski, where did they bury her? In Oslo, where she was a professor,” my mother once said about the greatest female mathematician of the nineteenth century. Russian-born, Kowalevski had not been allowed to be educated and never taught in her homeland. “I’m no better than Sophie,” she said.

That morning, the three of us—Anna, Bruce, and I—left the house together and walked slowly in our long coats. We navigated around the streaks of ice on the sidewalks with our slippery leather-bottomed shoes. It’s true that Bruce, despite hearing the stories from Russia and Poland again and again, could never fathom what life was like for me as a young child. He had spent all his years in dreamy America, where stories are expected to have happy endings. But he understood enough Yiddish and Polish to know when people were talking about him, and probably understood more Russian than he realized. As for Anna, she had lived a life that was far more like that of my parents’, but she had come here young enough to dip at least one toe into America and experience it freshly without always translating her experiences into the Russian equivalent. Though there were almost ten years separating us, we did share common experiences and a common mood and setting. We were here and we were there both.

“We’re going to be late,” Anna said.

“They aren’t going to start out without us,” I said.

“It’s so fucking cold here. Even colder than I remember,” Bruce said.

“Actually it’s getting warmer. Mendota freezes over for a smaller number of days every year,” I said.

“Don’t piss on my shoes with lies, Sasha,” Bruce said.

“That’s something
zaydeh
used to say in Yiddish. Very good translation, too,” I said.

“I remember. I’m not a dummy, you know,” Bruce said, getting defensive.

“True, but it is getting warmer. That’s a fact,” I said, getting pedantic.

“I’m channeling. I’m turning into an old Jew right before my very eyes,” Bruce said.

“I’m already there,” I said.

“That’s a fact, too,” Bruce said.

“I don’t like being late. It’s rude,” Anna said.

“We won’t be late, Anna. We have thirty-five minutes,” Bruce said.

“I don’t like falling and breaking my leg, either,” I said.

“Bruce took dance lessons. He can walk faster than this. We’ll pull you along.” Anna started to grab me by the elbow, but I resisted.

“I was never good at it. And besides, I don’t think Sasha wants any help.”

“No, I don’t. You’re right. Five minutes and we’ll be there. Just wait.”

We walked into the synagogue, the place as packed as it was for the High Holy Days. I could feel it again instantly, just like in Van Vleck Hall, the air of overpowering sadness. No, I don’t think I was projecting. These were my people. I knew their body language. Their arms swung when they were happy, and their shoulders sagged when they were defeated. If Binion’s World Series of Poker would allow only Russian and Polish Jews, I would eagerly sign up and make a killing every year. Then again, as my mother had told Anna, I don’t exactly possess a poker face myself.

We sat in the front row, my father, Shlomo, Cynthia, Bruce, Anna, and me. The rabbi stood on the
bima
, a man about my age who barely knew me, and I could sense his pride welling up as he surveyed the crowd before him. There are no Nobel Prizes in mathematics, which urban legend says is the result of Nobel’s wife screwing a mathematician (studying the topology of curved spaces, no doubt, haha), but really now, this seems far-fetched. More than likely it’s due to the fact that, while mathematics is a useful tool, the way it is studied by mathematicians is rather useless for society. Nobel was all about practical matters. I am too, sort of. My mother and my father? No. Their friends? Certainly not. Be that as it may, there is a Nobel equivalent in mathematics, the Fields Medal, which comes with five figures in cash. No woman has ever won this prize. We’ll get to why this is so later, but there were eleven Fields Medal winners in that synagogue, not an everyday occurrence.

I suppose I could have been angry at seeing this rabbi—who my mother thought was a hack—full of egotism. His beard had been tastefully trimmed just that morning, and he was taking in the crowd as if he were the star of a Broadway show. Instead, I was impressed. A few minutes before we began, he walked up to me, said just the right words of condolence, pulled out a little safety razor, and in a half second was done with the ceremonial tearing of my grandfather’s old tie. A real professional he was, or so I thought. In a small college town like Madison you usually got shy, tongue-tied, overintellectualizing minor leaguers. They were rabbis who couldn’t possibly handle the big congregations of New York, Chicago, or even Milwaukee. My mother probably had been, as per usual, overly critical.

I half listened to the words of praise that flowed from him. My mind was racing. Unlike the rabbi, I do not enjoy performing. I simply wanted to be in my own world and think my own thoughts about my mother, about my life, about my future, and about the ones I loved. But it was expected that I make a speech, a summary of my mother’s life, that I be the representative of this family for the crowd. To do less would be to shirk a major responsibility to show that this family, undeniably human, could rise above its frailties.

There is an old Jewish joke (are there ever any new ones?) that I thought about before I went to see the rabbi to discuss what he was going to say. A man dies, a complete scoundrel. His brother, also a scoundrel, goes to the rabbi the day before the funeral, and says, “I’ll give one million dollars to the synagogue if you call my brother a mensch
when you give your speech.” The rabbi spends a sleepless night thinking about what he’s going to say at the funeral. The morning comes. His heart is heavy as he gets ready. He stands in front of the congregation and says, “This man was a complete scoundrel, a swindler, a cheat, and a whoremonger. But in all honesty, compared to his brother, he was a mensch.”