The housekeeper and the professor - By Yoko Ogawa Page 0,47

up until I had agreed to take Root straight to the doctor.

He treated Root exactly as he treated prime numbers. For him, primes were the base on which all other natural numbers relied; and children were the foundation of everything worthwhile in the adult world.

I still take out that note sometimes and study it. On sleepless nights, or lonely evenings, when tears come to my eyes thinking about friends who are no longer here. I bow my head in gratitude for that one line.

8

It was on the day of the Star Festival that the Tigers lost their seventh game in a row, 1-0 against Taiyo.

I'd had no trouble falling back into the rhythm of the job, despite my month away. And because of the Professor's memory problem, he immediately forgot my misunderstanding with his sister-in-law. For him, no trace of the trouble remained.

I transferred the notes to his summer suit, taking care to fasten them in the same positions, and I rewrote those that were torn or faded.

"In an envelope in the desk, second drawer from the bottom."

"Theory of Functions, 2nd edition, pp. 315–372 and Commentary on Hyperbolic Functions, volume IV, chapter 1, § 17."

"Medicine to take after meals in manila envelope, on the left in the sideboard."

"Spare razor blades next to the mirror above the sink."

"Thank for the cake."

Some of the notes were out of date—it had been a month since Root had brought the Professor a little steamed bun he had baked in his home economics class—but it seemed wrong to throw them out. I treated them all with equal respect.

As I read through them, I realized how hard it was for the Profossor to simply get through the day, and how carefully he hid the enormous efforts he made. I tried to work as quickly as possible and not to linger over the notes. When they were all reattached, his summer suit was ready.

For a few weeks, the Professor had been working on an extremely difficult problem, one that would pay the largest cash prize in the history of the Journal of Mathematics to the reader who solved it. Indifferent to money, the Professor took pleasure in the difficulty of the problem itself. Checks from the journal were left unopened on the hall table, and when I asked him if he wanted me to cash his prize money at the post office, he shrugged. In the end, I asked the agency to forward them to his sister-in-law.

Just by looking at the Professor, I could tell that the new problem was especially hard. The intensity of his thought seemed to be near breaking point. He would vanish into the study as though he were literally retreating into his mind, and I imagined that his body might actually vaporize into pure contemplation and disappear. But then the sound of his pencil scratching across the paper would break the stillness and reassure me—the Professor was still with us and was making some progress with the proof.

I tried to imagine how he could work through a problem like this over such a long period of time—he basically had to start again from the beginning every morning. To compensate for the loss of his thoughts from the day before, he had only an ordinary notebook and the scribbled notes that covered his body like a cocoon. Since the accident, math was his life, so perhaps it was also what led him to sit down at his desk each day and return to the problem in front of him.

I was considering all of this while making dinner when the Professor suddenly appeared. Usually, when he was wrestling with a problem, I hardly saw him. I wasn't sure whether I would be interrupting his thinking if I spoke to him, so I continued seeding the peppers and peeling the onions. He walked over, leaned against the counter, folded his arms, and stood there staring at my hands. I felt awkward with him watching me, so I went to get some eggs out of the refrigerator, and a frying pan.

"Did you need something?" I asked at last, no longer able to stand the silence.

"No, go on," he said. His tone was reassuring. "I like to watch you cook," he added.

I wondered if the problem had proven so difficult his brain had blown a fuse—but I broke the eggs into a bowl and beat them with my chopsticks. I went on stirring after the spices had dissolved and the lumps were gone, only stopping when my