The housekeeper and the professor - By Yoko Ogawa Page 0,9

abandon him, and it's my job to come here." I wasn't sure why the Professor was so concerned about my son, but I went back to my recipe, adding some pepper and nutmeg.

"Who takes care of him when you're not home? Does your husband come home early from work? Does his grandmother watch him?"

"No, unfortunately there's no husband or grandmother. It's just the two of us."

"So he's at home all alone? He sits and waits for his mother in a dark house while you're here making dinner for a stranger? Making my dinner!"

No longer able to control himself, the Professor jumped up from his chair and began circling the table. The notes on his body trembled as he ran his hand nervously through his hair. Dandruff sprinkled on his shoulder. I turned off the soup just as it began to boil.

"You really don't need to worry," I said, trying to sound calm. "We've been doing this since he was much younger. Now that he's ten, he can manage for himself. He has the phone number here, and if he needs help, he knows to ask the landlord downstairs—"

"No, no, no!" The Professor cut me off as he paced around the table. "You should never leave a child alone. What if the heater fell over and started a fire? What if he choked on a candy? Who'd be there to help? Oh! I don't want to think about it. Go home right now! You should make dinner for your child. Go home!" He grabbed my arm and tried to pull me toward the door.

"I'll go," I said, "but I just have to make these hamburgers for you."

"Are you going to stand there frying hamburgers while your child could be dying in a fire? Now listen to me: beginning tomorrow you'll bring your son along with you. He can come straight here from school. He can do his homework, and be near his mother. And don't think you can fool me just because I'll forget by tomorrow."

He pulled off the tag that read "the new housekeeper" and fished a pencil from his pocket. Under the portrait, he added the words "and her son, ten years old."

I left that evening—or rather, I was chased out—without having time to wash my hands, let alone clean the kitchen properly. The Professor appeared even angrier than when I had interrupted his thinking. But his anger seemed to hide a deep fear, and I hurried home wondering what I would do if I found the apartment in flames.

Any reticence or wariness I felt for the Professor vanished the moment I saw him with my son, and from that point on I trusted him completely. As I'd promised the evening before, I gave my son a map to the house and told him to come directly from school. It was against agency rules to bring children to the workplace, but there was no denying the Professor.

When my son appeared at the door the next day with his schoolbag on his back, the Professor broke into a wide grin and opened his arms to embrace him. I didn't even have time to point at the line he'd added to his note—"and her son, ten years old." As a mother, it was a joy to see someone so completely embrace my child, and I felt a slight twinge of jealousy that my welcome from the Professor was always much more reserved.

"I'm so glad you've come!" he said, without any of the questions he asked me every morning. Bewildered by the unexpected greeting, my son stiffened, but managed a polite answer. The Professor took off my son's Hanshin Tigers baseball cap and rubbed his head. Then he gave him the nickname before he'd even learned his real one.

"I'm going to call you Root," he said. "The square root sign is a generous symbol, it gives shelter to all the numbers." And he quickly took off the note on his sleeve and made the addition: "The new housekeeper ... and her son, ten years old, ."

At first I made us name tags, thinking that if the Professor weren't the only one with notes clipped to him he might feel less anxious. I told my son to change his school name tag for one I made that read "." The experiment proved less successful than I'd hoped. No matter how much time passed, I was always the young woman who made painfully slow progress with numbers, and my son would be the boy