The housekeeper and the professor - By Yoko Ogawa Page 0,51

and the ruler does the rest. If you started with 1, it wouldn't work. So it's zero that allows us to use a ruler, too."

The rain continued. A siren wailed somewhere; the thunder drowned it out.

"But the most marvelous thing about zero is not that it's a sign or a measurement, but that it's a real number all by itself. It's the number that's one less than 1, the smallest of the natural numbers. Despite what the Greeks might have thought, zero doesn't disturb the rules of calculation; on the contrary, it brings greater order to them. Try imagining one little bird sitting on a branch, singing in a clear, high voice. He has a pretty little beak and colorful feathers. You stare at him, enchanted; but as soon as you breathe, he flies away, leaving only the bare branch, and a few dried leaves fluttering in the breeze." The Professor pointed out at the dark garden, as if the bird had really just flown away. The shadows seemed deeper and longer in the rain. "Yes, 1 - 1 = 0. A lovely equation, don't you think?"

He turned toward me. A loud clap of thunder shook the room, and the light in the main house blinked off for a moment. I gripped the sleeve of his jacket.

"Don't worry," he said, reaching over to stroke my hand. "The square root sign is a sturdy one. It shelters all the numbers."

Needless to say, Root came home safe and sound when his camping trip was over. He brought the Professor a little figurine of a sleeping rabbit he had made from twigs and acorns. The Professor set it on his desk, and at its feet he attached a note: "A present from (the housekeeper's son)."

I asked Root whether the storm on the first day of his trip had caused problems, but he said they hadn't had a drop of rain. In the end, the only damage from the lightning had been done to a gingko tree at a shrine near the Professor's house.

The heat returned, and with it the buzzing of the cicadas. The curtains and the floor were dry by the next day.

Root's attention turned to the Tigers. He had apparently hoped they would be in first place by the time he got back; but things had not gone his way and they had fallen back to fourth after losing to the first-place Swallows.

"Did you cheer for them while I was gone?"

"Of course we did," said the Professor. Root seemed to suspect that his team's problems had been caused by the Professor's negligence.

"But you don't even know how to turn on the radio."

"Your mother showed me."

"Really?"

"Really. She even tuned in the game for me."

"But they don't win if you just sit there and listen."

"I know, and I truly did cheer for them. I talked to the radio the whole time. I prayed Enatsu would strike out the side every inning." The Professor did everything he could to placate Root.

Soon, we were back to our evenings in the kitchen listening to the radio. The receiver, which was perched on top of the dish cupboard, had worked very well since the Professor had it repaired; and the terrible static that occasionally drowned out the game was due to the poor location of the cottage rather than to the radio itself.

We kept the volume low until the game came on, so low you could barely hear it over the everyday sounds—my puttering in the kitchen before dinner, the motorbikes on the street outside, the Professor muttering to himself, or Root's occasional sneeze. Only when we all fell silent could we hear the music, which always seemed to be some nameless old song.

The Professor was reading in his easy chair near the window. Root was fidgeting at the table, working on something in his notebook. The previous title on the notebook—"Cubic forms with whole-number coefficients, No. 11"—had been scratched out and replaced with "Tiger Notes" in Root's handwriting. The Professor had given him a notebook he no longer needed to record data on the team. The first three pages were filled with incomprehensible equations and the later ones with other esoteric bits of information, such as Nakada's ERA or Shinjo's batting average.

I was kneading bread dough in the kitchen. We had decided to have fresh bread, something we hadn't had in a long while; topped with cheese or ham or vegetables, it would be our dinner. The sun had set, but the air was stifling, as