The housekeeper and the professor - By Yoko Ogawa Page 0,5

week, he came to me with a bundle of papers covered with formulas and numbers, and asked me to send it off to the Journal of Mathematics.

"I'm terribly sorry to bother you, but ..."

His tone was polite, and completely unexpected after the way he had scolded me in his study on my first day. It was the first request he had made of me, and he was no longer "thinking," for the moment.

"It's no trouble at all," I told him. I carefully copied the mysterious foreign address onto the envelope and ran off happily to the post office.

When I returned, the Professor wasn't thinking anymore. He was stretched out in the easy chair by the kitchen window, and as he rested I was finally able to clean the study. I opened the windows and took his quilt and pillow out into the garden to air. And then I ran the vacuum cleaner at full throttle. The room was cluttered and chaotic, but comfortable.

I was not surprised to find balls of hair and moldy Popsicle sticks behind the desk, or a chicken bone resting on top of one of his bookshelves. And yet, the room was filled by a kind of stillness. Not simply an absence of noise, but an accumulation of layers of silence, untouched by fallen hair or mold, silence that the Professor left behind as he wandered through the numbers, silence like a clear lake hidden in the depths of the forest.

But despite its relative comfort, if you had asked me whether it was an interesting room, I would have had to say no. There was not a single object to spark the imagination, no trinkets from the Professor's past, no mysterious photographs or decorations that might have amused a housekeeper.

I attacked the bookshelves with the duster. Group Theory. Algebraic Number Theory. Studies in Number Theory.... Chevalley, Hamilton, Turing, Hardy, Baker.... So many books and not one I wanted to read. Half of them were in foreign languages, and I couldn't even make out the titles on the spines. A few notebooks were stacked on the desk, along with a scattering of pencil stubs and binder clips. How could he think at such a characterless desk? The residue from an eraser was the only evidence of the work that he had done here.

As I wiped away the dust, arranged the notebooks, and gathered up the clips, it occurred to me that a mathematician ought to have some sort of expensive compass you couldn't find in an ordinary stationery shop, or an elaborate slide rule. The seat of the chair was worn down where the Professor sat.

"When is your birthday?"

That evening after dinner, he did not disappear immediately into his study. Though I was busy cleaning up, he seemed to be looking for a topic of conversation.

"February twentieth."

"Is that so?"

The Professor had picked the carrots out of his potato salad and had left them on the plate. I cleared and wiped the table, noticing that he still seemed to spill a great deal, even when he wasn't thinking. It was spring, but still chilly once the sun set, so the oil heater was burning in the corner.

"Do you send a lot of articles to magazines?" I asked.

"I wouldn't call them 'articles.' They're just puzzles for amateur mathematicians. Sometimes there's even a prize. Wealthy men who love mathematics put up the money." He looked down, checking his suit in various places, and his gaze fell on a note clipped to his left pocket. "Oh, I see. I sent a proof to the Journal of Mathematics today."

It had been much more than eighty minutes since I'd made my trip to the post office.

"Oh, dear!" I said. "If it's a contest, I should have sent it express mail. If it doesn't get there first, I suppose you don't get the prize."

"No, there was no need to send it express. Of course, it's important to arrive at the correct answer before anyone else, but it's just as important that the proof is elegant."

"I had no idea a proof could be beautiful ... or ugly."

"Of course it can," he said. Getting up from the table, he came over to the sink where I was washing the dishes and peered at me as he continued. "The truly correct proof is one that strikes a harmonious balance between strength and flexibility. There are plenty of proofs that are technically correct but are messy and inelegant or counterintuitive. But it's not something you can put into words—explaining