The Mathematician’s Shiva (28 page)

“So now we have to struggle, Father? This is her final gift to us? To make us the worker bees of her legacy?”

“Sasha, she gave you life, and you’re complaining about translating her memoirs? You should think of it as an honor. Every word is written to you. You were her audience. I have no doubt.”

“She ever tell you about living off bear meat near the Barents Sea?”

“No. But I’m not surprised. Whatever it would take to survive, she would do it. I know my Rachela. She was a warrior. Like that proof you’re holding. The willpower to solve such a thing, it’s immense. I’m certain no American could do it.”

“You think it’s an honor to check her proof? You think you’re her audience, too?”

“No, the audience for this proof was herself and two men, one who died of cholera in Vorkuta and one who died a happy man in Moscow. But yes, it is an honor to check her proof. She could have given the work to anyone. She chose me.”

“It could have been a choice of convenience. You were close by. Plus, she knew you’d keep quiet about it until she died.”

“No, don’t tell me sour fairy tales. Your mother was never lazy. And we have to keep our mouths shut for a while longer, both of us. You have your work to do. I have mine. We are the worker bees. And that,” he pointed to the proof in my hand, “is the work of pure genius.”

“I
t’s a little different than the last time we were together like this,” my father said, He dropped his suitcase in the tiled hallway and looked at the interior of my home, sizing it all up.

“It was over forty-five years ago, Father,” I said.

“This is nicer than our apartment in Moscow, that’s for certain.”

“I don’t remember, but I can imagine.”

“The river, is it the Warrior or the Black Warrior here?” He pointed to the water visible from the living room windows.

“The Warrior. It doesn’t turn into the Black Warrior for another five miles.”

“It’s a nice place you have. Spacious and modern.”

“No one wanted it when it was built. They said it was ‘different.’ In the South, different doesn’t mean new and interesting. It means odd and awful.”

“Different is good for us usually.”

I didn’t remember much about the last time my father and I lived together without my mother. I knew we had lived in an apartment in Moscow. I could remember being drilled to speak English like an American, to mimic voices on records and tapes. Most of the audio came from American radio dramas. The way the children on these shows interacted with their parents, free of shouting and so polite, seemed as foreign to me as the language of English itself. “Are people in America really like this?” I remember asking my father.

“Yes, of course. They all are like this.”

“Will we have to be like this when we move?”

“No. We can be like we are.”

This answer had been reassuring. For while I was certain that I could master English, mastering American culture seemed both impossible and undesirable. To this day I don’t understand this country well. The cheery optimism. The lack of concern about the past. The openness to strangers who simply show a smile and give a firm handshake. How can people be consistently unguarded and so willing to show their personalities in such an unvarnished way? How can people under a dark cloud for days, weeks, and perhaps years view hardship as temporary? Where does this blithe strength come from?

I can mimic some of the outward signs of these behaviors. I’ve had flashes of optimism, myself. But I cannot feel like an American. I can only admire the American spirit.

We Karnokovitches and Czerneskis are always seeing obstacles and aware that many cannot be overcome, no matter the strength of our willpower. Still, we can somehow solve mathematical problems that are accepted as intractable by nearly all and will take up decades of our time. We can crawl out of mass graves and live for untold days in a forest until we are rescued.

Sometimes our plans are created out of desperation and, despite our intelligence, are inherently rickety. We can elude the careful eyes of the KGB and, pretending to be American tourists, one supposedly hard-of-hearing adult and one loquacious four-year-old boy following instructions drilled into him, cross the border into Poland.

That was how my father and I managed to get to America. The plan required a time when tumult would reign in Moscow and beyond. We needed a day when the KGB would be too busy to bother with keeping tabs on the husband and son of a defector, small potatoes on the list of threats to Soviet dominance. My father didn’t know when that day would be. He waited patiently through all of 1952, a year when the borders became tighter and tighter with every passing month. Then it came, March 6, 1953. The Russians poured out of their homes wailing in the street over the loss of their great leader, Stalin. As when Tolstoy died, chaos ruled. Grief so consumed Moscow that no one seemed to care or notice as we left our apartment, and Soviet soldiers barely looked at our false papers at the train station. They noted our American clothes made by Sears and Roebuck, asked us questions that I was schooled to answer, and let us through. At the Polish border, whatever suspicions possessed by those who examined us disappeared when I stated, in my apparently convincing American English, how sorry I was to hear of Russia’s loss. According to my father, a guard broke down in tears in response. Once in Poland, my grandfather’s Zionist connections found us a way into Czechoslovakia, and then to Italy, Israel, and finally the USA. I remember only one thing of this trip: sitting on a tall stone wall and looking down at the bald head of my father. My father once told me that the wall I remember was not an actual border but rather was part of a castle outside of Florence. I owe my American life to the death of Joseph Stalin. I also owe it to my father and his constant lessons.

In America, my father continued to drill me, not in English, but in mathematics. His disappointment that I did not pursue the only professional path he could imagine for me had been profound. The pain that I felt over his disappointment had been tremendous. But my father had been correct in his assessment of what our life would be like in America. We didn’t change. We thrived here, certainly. It wasn’t because we adapted. It was because of our strength of will.

My father took up residency in my guest room. He was supposed to be teaching in Madison in one week—it was going to be the last semester before he formally retired—but he sent an e-mail that due to the death of his wife, he would be unable to teach set theory one last time. Someone else would have to do the job. He was asked if he had any suggestions for a replacement. He said no.

He told no professional colleagues where he was. It didn’t take long for those interested in his whereabouts to check out the possibilities. When I started to receive calls, I didn’t deny that my father was with me. But he didn’t want to talk to anyone even remotely related to mathematics. He was working, I was instructed to tell them. I was not at liberty to say exactly what he was working on. I didn’t know myself, I said. How this opaqueness on my part was transmitted in the mathematics rumor mill I could well guess. So could my father. Neither of us cared one whit.

No one could ever fault my father on his professionalism or commitment to mathematics. It was his life. He was not a genius, and he held no illusions that he was. But he worked steadily on his problems, and his work was important enough that he would have received tenure at any number of high-quality institutions in the United States regardless of who his wife was.

For two weeks, he worked in my guest room every day. At night we would eat together. Sometimes he would cook, other times it would be my turn. There was no set order. One of us would simply move into the kitchen before the other and start. After dinner we would drink and play chess. Every third day or so, he would call my daughter and granddaughter and talk to them. I would talk as well, but it was actually difficult for me to get a word in when we were on the phone together, especially when he talked to my granddaughter.

All parents have their strengths and weaknesses, and listening to my father during these conversations I began to understand that, despite his formal demeanor, he was surprisingly good with young children. I could hear my granddaughter responding to his encouragement. He assumed she was intelligent, he didn’t talk down to her, and you could hear the warmth in his voice. I wished then and there that I had a tape or video of my father and me from when I was that age. I’m certain that it would show two people as close and loving as a father and a son could be.

Perhaps in an American family a father and a son with a difficult past would—in late and middle age, respectively, together in a house day after day—open up and say what needed to be said to heal old wounds. There would be declarations of forgiveness on both sides. But I don’t think so. It would be unusual in any culture, even one as wed to happy endings as America’s. Certainly that wasn’t going to happen with my father and me in any explicit way.

Two weeks into my father’s stay, he announced that he needed a change of scenery. “Are you going to Berkeley?” I asked.

“No, Biloxi. I need the inspiration of sea air. I understand it’s nice there this time of year.”

“You want my car? It’s about a four-hour drive.”

“No, I understand they have buses that go there for the gamblers. I’ll take one of those. I’ll be back in a week or two.” Just like that, he was gone.

The people in my department were solicitous of me during my first few weeks back. I also received condolence cards by the bucketful from mathematicians around the world. I would spend most of my day opening and reading them. I wasn’t getting much work done.

I had called Jenny Rivkin on the day that Yakov demanded I do so. It was a short conversation. I followed that up with an e-mail thanking her for all her help during the shiva. Twenty-four hours later I received a response thanking me for my kind words. More e-mails were exchanged. Those e-mails escalated quickly into phone calls. The length of those calls, always in my office while my father was in town, stretched from tens of minutes to hours once he left, and would often last until early morning. I wasn’t getting much sleep either.

One week after my father left, without a word from him during all that time, a barrage of phone messages and e-mails from reporters began—almost as extensive as the barrage of phone messages and e-mails from mathematicians with “buy me a vowel” last names—all about one thing: an abstract published online on the American Mathematical Society Web site. There was an addendum to the upcoming annual meeting, a special symposium entitled, “Sixty Years of Mathematics: The Work of Dr. Rachela Karnokovitch.” The usual suspects had submitted abstracts for that symposium, including my father. The title of his abstract was “On the Solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem.” The lead author on the paper was R. Karnokovitch, deceased, formerly of the Department of Mathematics, University of Wisconsin. The second author was A. Grozslev, deceased, formerly of the Department of Mathematics, University of St. Petersburg, Russia. The third author was V. Karnokovitch, of the Department of Mathematics, University of Wisconsin. The fourth author was A. Karnokovitch, Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Alabama. The fifth author? None other than S. Czerneski, Madison, Wisconsin, no affiliation given.

“Why is everyone calling me?” my uncle asked. “My cell phone is full. I try to delete the messages. They fill up faster than I can get rid of them. Why the attention?”

“It’s because you are a coauthor of the most important paper in mathematics to be presented at a conference in a long, long time,” I said.

“Oh. Interesting. Before, I was a published meteorologist. Now I’m going to be a published mathematician. How did this happen?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been trying to contact my father to find out.”

“Where is he?”

“Biloxi.”

“It’s in Mississippi, yes? What the hell is he doing there?”

“I don’t know. He’s not answering his cell.”

“I got him that phone. He never uses it.”

“There are also no major hotels there that have anyone registered with the name Karnokovitch.”

“Maybe he’s not in Biloxi.”

“No, he’s there. I know it. Congratulations, by the way, on your newly found fame.”

“Thank you, Sasha.”

“You can congratulate me as well.”

“You are now a published mathematician, too?”

“Yes, just like you.”

“Well deserved. Your father always wanted you to be a mathematician.”

“I know.”

“I’m not going to answer a single one of these messages. I’m going to get a new cell phone with a new number. I wanted a new one, anyway. They make them so good now. Those mathematicians and reporters can all fuck themselves.”

“Anna still in town?” I asked.

“For the foreseeable future, yes. Until I sell this damn business and move.”

A couple of reporters, nerdy science types whose articles were always buried somewhere deep inside their newspapers, actually traveled to Tuscaloosa to knock on my door. I told them I had no comment. Yakov and a few other mathematicians, in tones that were by turns indignant and joyful, left messages on my cell phone as well. My father went missing for three more days before he showed up.

“I won three thousand dollars. I had a marvelous time,” my father said.

“Looks like you got a tan, Father.”

“That too. Very nice sea air. You ought to think about buying a condo there. Very peaceful.”

“Thanks for the real-estate advice. By the way, I don’t know anything about the solution to the Navier-Stokes problem.”

“Actually, you do. You don’t know it, but a paper of yours, something entitled, ‘On the Spatial Distribution of Velocity of Hurricane Frieda’ interested your mother very much. You are very good at making graphics, by the way. There are some compelling images. I used your data as an example of the natural state of velocity under conditions of turbulence in the paper to be presented at the symposium. Your mother suggested that I do so. Blame her, if you must. I didn’t ask for your permission to use the data. So out of courtesy, I included you as an author.”

“And you included Shlomo, as well.”

“Of course. He’s a coauthor on your paper. I didn’t ask for his permission, either. You’ve heard about the paper, I take it then?”

“I’ve heard about it. I didn’t know you read my work.”

“Not usually, no. But that paper. It was in
Science
. Your mother showed it to me. I read it. Very interesting material.”

“I shouldn’t have my name on this paper, Father.”

“No, you shouldn’t. Technically, you’re right. But your mother and I are, underneath it all, very sentimental people,” my father said. He was already in the kitchen pouring vodka. He poured two glasses, both full to the brim. We spilled as we drank.