The housekeeper and the professor - By Yoko Ogawa Page 0,11

from the oversized gown, flailed from time to time as if in protest at having been left here by mistake.

I was eighteen, ignorant, and alone. My cheeks were sunken from morning sickness that had continued right up to the moment I lay down on the delivery table. My hair stank with sweat, and my pajamas were still stained where my water had broken.

There were fifteen babies in the nursery and he was the only one awake. It was before dawn and the halls were empty except for the women at the nurse's station. His fists had been clenched tight, but at that moment he opened them, and then awkwardly bent them closed again. The small fingernails were dark and discolored with traces of what I assumed was my blood.

"Excuse me," I called, staggering down to the nurse's station. "I'd like to cut my baby's fingernails. He seems to be moving his hands a lot and I'm afraid he'll scratch himself...." Perhaps I was trying to convince myself that I was a good mother.

From the time of my earliest memories, I had no father. My mother had fallen in love with a man she could never marry, and she had raised me by herself. She worked at a reception hall that people hired for weddings. She had started out helping wherever she was needed—bookkeeping, dressing the wedding parties, flower arranging, table coordination—and ended up managing the whole place.

She was a strong woman who hated nothing more than having people think of her daughter as poor and fatherless. Though we were, in fact, poor, she did her best to make us look and feel rich. She asked the women who worked in the dressmaking department to give us scraps of material from which she made all my clothes. She arranged for the organist at the hall to give me piano lessons at a discount. And she brought home the leftover flowers and made pretty arrangements for the apartment.

I suppose I became a housekeeper because I kept house for my mother from the time I was a small child. When I was barely two and not quite potty trained, I would wash out my own panties if I had an accident; and before I was even in elementary school, I was using the knives in the kitchen and cutting up the ingredients to make fried rice. By the time I was ten, I not only took care of the whole apartment, but I was even paying the electric bill and attending meetings of the neighborhood association in my mother's place.

My mother never said a word against my father and always insisted he was a fine man and terribly handsome. He managed a restaurant somewhere, but the specifics were always kept from me. I was given to understand, however, that he was tall, fluent in English, and a connoisseur of opera.

The image I have of my father is that of a statue in a museum. No matter how close I come to him, I can't get his attention, he continues to stare off into the distance without looking down, and he never reaches out his hand to me.

It wasn't until I entered adolescence that it occurred to me how odd it was that the wonderful man my mother described had abandoned us and had never offered even the least bit of economic support. But by that time I had no interest in learning more about him, and I accepted the role of silent accomplice when it came to my mother's illusions.

It was my pregnancy that utterly destroyed those illusions, along with the others she'd carefully stitched together from fabric scraps, piano lessons, and leftover flowers. It happened not long after I'd started my junior year of high school.

The boy was someone I'd met at my after-school job, a college student majoring in electrical engineering. He was a quiet and cultured young man, but he lacked the decency to take responsibility for what had happened. The mysterious knowledge of electricity that had attracted me to him in the first place proved useless, and he became just another careless man who vanished from my world.

Once my pregnancy became obvious, there was nothing I could do to appease my mother's anger, even though we now shared the experience of giving birth to a fatherless child. It was a melodramatic sort of anger. Her feelings seemed to block out my own. I left home in the twenty-second week of my pregnancy and I lost all contact with her.

When