The housekeeper and the professor - By Yoko Ogawa Page 0,18
seen him so distressed. He had always calmly accepted the way his memory failed him, but this time was different. This time he couldn't ignore the facts. Seeing him this way, I even forgot to worry about Root, who had received a shock of his own at causing the Professor such pain.
"But even after they traded him to the Carp, he was the best in the league." I hoped this would reassure him, but this new information distressed him even more.
"The Carp? What do you mean? How could Enatsu wear anything but the Hanshin pinstripes?"
He sat down and rested his elbows on the desk, running his hands through his freshly cut hair. Tiny clippings fell on his notebook. This time it was Root who rubbed the Professor's head. He smoothed the mussed hair as if trying to undo the trouble he'd caused.
Root and I were quiet on the way home that evening. When I asked him whether the Tigers had a game, his answer was barely audible.
"Who are they playing?"
"Taiyo."
"You think they'll win?"
"Who knows."
The lights were out in the barbershop and the park was empty. The formulas the Professor had scratched in the dirt were hidden in the shadows.
"I shouldn't have said those things," Root said. "But I didn't know he liked Enatsu so much."
"I didn't know, either," I said. And then, though it was probably wrong of me, I added, "Don't worry, it will all be back to normal by tomorrow morning. In the Professor's mind, Enatsu will be the Tigers' ace again and he won't remember anything about the Carp."
The problem that the Professor had posed to Root proved to be almost as difficult as the one that Enatsu had presented for all of us.
As the Professor had predicted, the man at the repair shop said that he had never seen such an old radio and that he wasn't sure he could fix it. But if he could, he said, he would try to have it done in a week's time. So every day, when I got home from work, I spent my evening looking for another way to find the sum of the natural numbers from 1 to 10. Root should have been working on the problem, too, but perhaps because he was upset over the incident with Enatsu, he gave up almost immediately and left me to find a solution. For my part, I was anxious to please the Professor, and I certainly didn't want to disappoint him any more than we already had. But the only way to please him, I suspected, was through numbers.
I began by reading the problem aloud, just as the Professor had insisted Root do with his homework: "1 + 2 + 3 + ... 9 + 10 is 55. 1 + 2 + 3 + ..." But this didn't seem to be much help—except to show that a simple equation could conceal a terribly difficult problem.
Next I tried writing out the numbers from 1 to 10 both horizontally and vertically and grouping them by odds and evens, primes and non-primes, and so on. I worked on the problem with matches and marbles, and when I was at the Professor's house, I jotted down numbers on the back of any piece of scrap paper, always looking for a clue.
To find an amicable number, all you had to do was perform the same sort of calculation again and again. If you had enough time, you'd eventually succeed. But this was different. I was constantly starting off in a new direction, looking for another way to approach the problem, only to wind up at a dead end, confused. To be honest, I wasn't always even sure of what I was trying to do. At times I seemed to be going around in circles and at others almost backward, away from a solution; and in the end, I was often simply staring at the scrap paper.
I'm not sure why I became so absorbed in a child's math problem with no practical value. At first, I was conscious of wanting to please the Professor, but gradually that feeling faded and I realized it had become a battle between the problem and me. When I woke in the morning, the equation was waiting—1 + 2 + 3 + ... 9 + 10 = 55—and it followed me all through the day, as though it had burned itself into my retina and could not be ignored.
At first, it was just a small distraction, but it quickly became