The housekeeper and the professor - By Yoko Ogawa Page 0,62

be fine. Nothing to get upset about."

In a businesslike manner, I set about repairing the damage. The trick was to get everything back to normal as quickly as possible, without giving the Professor time to think.

The cake had fallen from the box, crushing one side. The other half, however, was more or less intact, with most of the chocolate-frosting message still legible: The Professor & Root, Congr— I cut it in three pieces and used a knife to fix the whipped cream. Then I gathered up the scattered strawberries, jelly bunnies, and sugar angels and spread them around as evenly as I could. Finally, I put the candles in Root's piece. "Look!" I announced at last. "Good as new!"

Root peered into the Professor's eyes. "And it'll taste just as good," he said.

"No harm done," I chimed in. But the Professor sat there in silence.

To be honest, I was more worried about the tablecloth than the cake. No matter how much I'd wiped, there were still crumbs and smudges of whipped cream down in the eyelets of the lace. All my scrubbing had only succeeded in filling the room with a sickly sweet smell; but the intricate design of the material had been completely spoiled.

I hid the stain under the platter of roast beef, warmed the soup, and found a match to light the candles. The announcer on the radio said that Yakult had come from behind in the third and was leading the Tigers. Root had the Enatsu card, decorated with a yellow ribbon, hidden in his pocket.

"There, look. Everything's set. Here, Professor, have a seat." As I took him by the hand, he looked up at last and noticed Root standing beside him.

"How old are you?" he murmured. "And what was your name again ... your head, it's just like the square root sign.... We can come to know an infinite range of numbers with this one little sign, even those we can't see...." Then the Professor reached across the table and rubbed Root's head.

11

On June 24, 1993, there was an article in the newspaper about Andrew Wiles, an Englishman teaching at Princeton University. He had proven Fermat's Last Theorem. There were two large pictures stretching across the page, one a photograph of Wiles, a casually dressed man with curly, receding hair, and the other an engraving of Pierre de Fermat, in a flowing seventeenth-century academic gown. In their own funny way, the two pictures told the story of how long it had taken to solve Fermat's riddle. The article praised Wiles's solution as a triumph of the human intellect and a quantum leap in the field. It also noted that Wiles had built on an idea that had been developed by two Japanese mathematicians, Yutaka Taniyama and Goro Shimura, a proposition known as the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture.

When I reached the end of the article, I did what I always did when I thought of the Professor. I took out the scrap of paper folded in my wallet, the one on which he had written Euler's formula: eπi + 1 = 0.

I was glad to know it was there, this unchanging testament to a peaceful soul.

The Tigers didn't win the pennant in 1992. They might have had a chance if they had won their last two games with Yakult, but they lost 2–5 on October 10 and finished the season in second place, trailing by two games.

Root was distraught at the time, but years later he came to appreciate what a thrill it had been just to have them reach the playoffs. After the 1993 season, they went into a long slump; and still, well into the new millennium, they are perennial cellar-dwellers. Sixth place, sixth place, fifth, sixth, sixth, sixth, sixth.... They have changed managers many times; Shinjo went to play in America, Minoru Murayama passed away.

Looking back on it now, the turning point seemed to be that game with Yakult on September 11, 1992. If they had won that game, they might have taken the pennant and perhaps they could have avoided drifting into the slump.

After we'd cleaned up the party at the Professor's and gone home to our apartment, we immediately turned on the radio. The game was in the final innings, tied 3-3. Root soon fell asleep, but I listened to the end.

It was the bottom of the ninth with two outs and a man on first. The count was full when Yagi hit what appeared to be a walk-off home run into the left-field stands.