The housekeeper and the professor - By Yoko Ogawa Page 0,54

though they lost the familiarity they had in the Professor's own handwriting, seemed all the more impressive in print, the force of their incomprehensible arguments all the more powerful, even to me.

The study was hotter than the rest of the house, perhaps because it had been closed up and silent for so long. As I packed away the issues of the journal that did not mention the Professor, I thought about the dentist's office and I calculated the time again. With the Professor, you always had to keep in mind his eighty-minute memory. Still, no matter how many times I added it up, we'd been apart less than an hour.

I told myself that the Professor was only human, and even though he was a brilliant mathematician, there was no reason why the eighty-minute cycle should be entirely reliable. Circumstances change from day to day, and the people who are subject to them change as well. The Professor had been in pain, and strangers were poking around in his mouth; perhaps this had thrown off his inner clock.

The stack of magazines containing the Professor's work was as high as my waist. How precious they were to me, these proofs he had devised, studded like jewels in an otherwise featureless journal. I straightened the pile. Here was the embodiment of the Professor's labors, and the concrete proof that his abilities had not been lost in that terrible accident.

"What are you doing?" He had finished his bath and was back in the study. His lips were still slack from the Novocain, but his jaw was less swollen. He seemed more cheerful, too, as if the pain had eased. I glanced quickly at the clock on the wall; he had been in the bath for less than thirty minutes.

"I'm straightening up the magazines," I said.

"Well, thank you, I appreciate it. But I don't think I really need to keep them. It's a lot to ask, but would you mind throwing them out?"

"I'm afraid I can't do that."

"Why not?"

"Because they're full of your work," I said, "the wonderful things you've accomplished."

He gave me a hesitant look but said nothing. The water dripping from his hair made blotches on his notes.

The cicadas that had been crying all morning suddenly fell silent. The garden baked under the blinding glare of the summer sun. If you looked carefully, you could see a line of thin clouds beyond the mountains at the horizon, clouds that seemed to announce the coming of autumn. They were just at the spot where the evening star would rise.

Not long after Root started school again, a letter arrived from the Journal of Mathematics. The Professor's proof, which he had worked on all summer, had won first prize.

The Professor, of course, showed no sign of pleasure. He barely looked at the letter before tossing it on the table without a word or a smile.

"It's the largest prize in the history of the Janaruobu," I pointed out. Afraid I would mangle the pronunciation of the long foreign title, I had taken to calling it simply the Janaruobu.

The Professor gave a bored sigh.

"Do you know how hard you worked on that proof? You barely ate or slept for weeks. You literally sweated out the answer—and there are salt rings on your suit to prove it." Knowing he had forgotten all this, I wanted at least to remind him of his efforts. "Well, I remember how hard you worked," I said. "And how heavy the proof was when you gave it to me to mail, and how proud I was when I got to the window at the post office."

"Is that so?"

No matter what I said, he barely responded.

Perhaps all mathematicians underestimated the importance of their accomplishments. Or perhaps this was just the Professor's nature. Surely there must be ambitious mathematicians who wanted to be known for the advancements they made in their field. But none of that seemed to matter to the Professor. He was completely indifferent to a problem as soon as he had solved it. Once the object of his attention had yielded, showing its true form, the Professor lost interest. He simply walked away in search of the next challenge.

Nor was he like this only with numbers. When he had carried the injured Root to the hospital, or when he had protected him from the foul ball, it had been difficult for him to accept our gratitude—he was not being stubborn or perverse, he simply couldn't understand what he had done to deserve our