The Mathematician’s Shiva Read online

  For my mother, it was the one-two punch of those deaths that knocked her back. My aunt had been born in a Polish partisan encampment during the war, but her family was from a dorf not far from my mother’s hometown. They were like sisters, those two, and over the years had developed their own private language. I remember well listening to their mixture of Yiddish and Polish as they sat at the kitchen table drinking tea.

  My aunt was a social creature in ways my mother could never be. She lived in the here and now, and was almost always impossibly optimistic about the future of mankind. When I was in my teens, I started to read Chekhov and noticed his fondness for including a female character in plays and stories like The Three Sisters’ Irina, someone who believed with every bit of her being, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the future would bring a better world. I thought, “Oh, Chekhov maybe had an aunt like mine.” He could have, for all I know, but more than likely Irina was a stand-in for Chekhov himself. My aunt was joyful, her presence made others instantly feel better about themselves, and she died too young.

  When my aunt died, we lost our little good luck charm, although Bruce, once you scratch away his hip exterior and stupid French cigarettes, is like his mother in a lot of ways. Aunt Zloteh always had such consistent goyishe mazel that when she came back from the doctor with her diagnosis of cancer, we, a family that always defers to rational science, were half convinced that the doctors were completely wrong. Maybe if my aunt had lived a good many years, my mother wouldn’t have been so devastated by the death of her father at a naturally ripe age. But nature rarely gives us convenient respites, and tragic events, just like celebrations, seem to get bunched together.

  “I wish Rachela would have believed in the afterlife,” my father said. “She would have been comforted a bit by thinking she was going to join those two.”

  “They were a good trio. They understood each other.”

  “It’s true. But I’ll tell you this. I’m not going anytime soon. I swear I’m going to hang around and torture you for another ten years at least.”

  “You’re moving to Tuscaloosa?” I didn’t know if his brand of torture could be conducted over a long distance.

  “You’ve got to be kidding. It’s too warm down there.”

  “You’ve never been. How would you know?”

  “I’m not an idiot. I don’t have to visit. All I have to do is look at Weather dot com. I don’t know how you can do any decent work in such a climate.”

  “It’s true, you can’t ski there.”

  “How long has it been since you’ve put on a pair of skis, anyway?” My father looked genuinely curious as to what my answer would be.

  “Downhill? Two years ago, maybe.”

  “No, not downhill. Any idiot can be hauled like a garbage can up a mountain just so he can let gravity slide him down. I mean up and down both. On a cold clear day.”

  “Cross-country? Forever.”

  “I’m going to take you out on a pair of skis again. I still went out with your mother, you know, when she was sick. I didn’t think it was a good idea, actually. But she insisted. She needed to think clearly.”

  “Math still?”

  “A little. She thought mostly about other things. Family history. You.”

  “I’m a grown man. I live eight hundred miles away. I’m not a well-posed problem.”

  “A mother still worries. Always.”

  “And a father?”

  “No, not me. I don’t worry about you. I raised you. You grew up. My biological purpose on this planet ended a long time ago. And you, your biological purpose. You didn’t follow through on that.”

  “I did. At least one time.”

  “Not that I can see. Not that anyone in your family can see.” My father gave me the look of a scold.

  “It’s true. I let my nakhes slip away. But your biological purpose seems to be quite intact given the way you still chase after skirts.”

  “That’s different. That has nothing to do with my biological purpose. It’s for pleasure.”

  “Mistakes happen. Those little guys can still swim. Even at your age.” The thought of him fathering a child made me panic a bit.

  “No, they can’t. Not for twenty years.”

  “What? You never told me.”

  “Why would I tell you? Is it a requirement in this country that a father and son engage in locker room conversation?”

  “It hurt?”

  “What? The surgery?”

  “Yes, the snipping. They say you get elephant balls for a few days after.” I shouldn’t have been taunting my father, but I couldn’t help it.

  “A lovely image you’ve just conjured up. This isn’t my kind of conversation. You know it isn’t.”

  “True. I didn’t come here to discuss your fertility, anyway.”

  “So why did you come?”

  “I need to lay down the law with these idiots. I don’t want tomorrow to turn into a circus.”

  “You can’t control these cockroaches. You know that. Your mother’s death has been like turning on a light in an apartment bathroom at night. It’s making these crazy people scurry around furiously.”

  “I’m still going to lay down the law. Ollie’s rounding them all up. We’re going to meet in Room B102.”

  “I don’t know if you can fit them all in there.” My father seemed surprised by my resolve.

  “Ollie says it seats 350.”

  “All those great minds. Not a one of them with a milligram worth of common sense. You really think you can make them behave?”

  “I’m going to try in a half hour.”

  “I was going to say it’s your funeral, but that would be in bad taste, I know.”

  “I need the keys to Mom’s office. I need to figure out what I’m going to say to these szalency.”

  “They keep trying to get in there. They think there is some great secret to be discovered.” He didn’t hide his disgust.

  “You been in there lately?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe there is. You never know.”

  “I know,” my father said as he tossed me the key. “There’s nothing there.”

  My mother and father had offices on different floors. It had always been so, even before Van Vleck Hall had been erected. The place was showing its wear, I noticed. It was as if deferred maintenance were a requirement for running a modern public university. I walked into my mother’s office and sensed that no one had been inside for weeks at least.

  I could see the dust in the air, visible in the rays of light that came through the slits in the blinds. I walked to the windows, turned the plastic rod, not surprisingly the same make of plastic rod as in my own office, and looked outside for a bit.

  My mother’s desk was filled with piles of research papers and books checked out of the library. She had a thing about file cabinets, absolutely hated them. There was something about having a metal or wood case filled with papers that she found offensive. Why? I don’t know. It was the same with raisins. It’s just how she was, and the fact of the matter is that when you achieve a certain level of fame and notoriety—even in the obscure world of mathematics—you’re given license to act on your whims and neuroses with abandon.

  In her office, my mother had filled her open-wall shelves with orange faux–leather bound banker’s boxes. The boxes were in turn filled with copies of papers, works in progress, and letters. One of these boxes was on her desk. It turned out that my father had been wrong about the absence of secrets in my mother’s office. At least I was surprised. The box was labeled, Papers of A.K. A for Alexander, my legal first name. K for Karnokovitch.

  I knew the research papers contained in that box, of course. I never sent her copies of my writing. She never asked for them, either. But here they were, Xeroxed copies of my papers, the ones where I was first author, at any r
ate. One of the papers had been pulled out, and I could see my mother’s handwriting on the margins. She wasn’t just collecting my papers. She was analyzing them.

  We never talked about my work, although she would show up sometimes when I gave visiting lectures in the atmospheric sciences department at Wisconsin. One time by happenstance we were both giving lectures at the University of Arizona, and she suggested that we come to each other’s talks. I remember my mother walking into the cinder-block lecture hall of the atmospheric sciences department with a troupe of skinny young male mathematicians, pathetic bodyguards of a sort. I looked at her in the middle of the lecture hall as I began and smiled. I knew why mother had brought her Arizona colleagues. She was kvelling, plain and simple.

  Many years later, when my mother was already sick, I gave a talk in Wisconsin, and she again appeared. There was again a troupe of mathematicians with her, but this time their purpose was practical. They were making sure she was OK. In the middle of my lecture, she bolted from the room and went out a side door, only to show up again, her makeup redone, ten minutes later. I asked her about it after the lecture. “I had to throw up,” she said matter-of-factly.

  Did I kvell at my mother’s lectures? Of course, or as they say in my home state, you betcha. She was more than just a mother to me, just like she was more than just a wife to my father and more than just a sister to my uncle. She was our source of pride, the standard-bearer of our family’s yikhes, our family’s bloodline. If anyone doubted that our gene pool was worth continuing for another millennium, we could always point to her. The world was lucky to have my mother. I was lucky to be her son. You betcha, indeed.

  But getting into the kishkes of one of my papers—this one had been written in 1982—was about something more than just kvelling. She was using my work for something. I thought of Einstein and his progeny. His son Hans, like me, didn’t even try to follow in the footsteps of his father (and mother) but ran away at an oblique angle to become a fluid dynamicist. He studied the motion of water in rivers. The great Einstein went to the trouble of doing a bit of research in his son’s field, and even wrote a paper on the topic of why rivers meander. Perhaps my mother was trying to do something similar. Whatever the reason she was looking at my work, the recognition that she was in such close intellectual proximity to me lifted my heart, and I forgot, for a moment, my grief.

  Mourning. Who can possibly be good at such an awful endeavor? Your heart really does feel heavy. That’s not some poetic metaphor. Your skin feels absent of moisture. Your breath is shallow and you literally ache as you try to take more air into your lungs. Everything slows down and your senses dull. It’s a coping mechanism, I guess, and a good one. Who wants to be aware during such a time? Your mind, if it were fully alert, would send you the images and feelings of a real-life horror show.

  I just needed to get through tomorrow in one piece, I thought. I needed to recite one speech at the funeral, and I didn’t really care if it was anything close to perfect. I needed to make sure these mathematicians would be kind enough to sit in one place for one hour and keep their mouths shut.

  I walked into Room B102, and there they were. The mathematicians. I knew many of them by sight. Ollie walked up to me, and somehow, the sight of his familiar shiny bald head made me feel better. I had known this man for forever. We’d even played in Little League together.

  “I’m sorry for your loss, Sasha.”

  “Thank you, Ollie. They’re all here, I see. I know getting them together must not have been easy,” I said, shaking Ollie’s hand.

  “It wasn’t that hard, really. Anything you need? A microphone, maybe?”

  “I’m like my mother, you know. I can get along very well without one.”

  I looked out at the crowd. My father stood by the back door eyeing me. In the front sat Yakov Epshtein from Nebraska, his plump face absent its usual glow. Vladimir Zhelezniak, whom I had never met, sat along one aisle. Peter Orlansky from Princeton, someone who had written well over two dozen papers with my mother, looked down as I recognized him. Many of these people had known me when I was a child and teen. But that was way back when, decades ago.

  Three hundred people sat enveloped by the stale air and deathly lighting that are a staple of college lecture halls everywhere. There was no sign of Otrnlov. I didn’t know if this was a good thing. They were all so quiet, these mathematicians. They were obviously in mourning, too. My father walked from the back of the room to the podium. I watched him carefully. He was seventy-seven years old, and he still strode with the confidence of a man who believed his body would never betray him.

  “My son would like to say a few words to you. I ask that you listen carefully.” He nodded to me and walked off to the side. I took a breath. I could feel the ache inside my lungs. A quad muscle in my thigh began to tremble. I thought of my grandfather and what he would have said to me had he been there: “Shtark zich.” Make yourself strong.

  “I know many of you, quite a few for many years. I know you have come here to honor the life of my mother. And to mourn, as well. I can sense the sadness in this room, and to tell you the truth, it’s a comfort to feel that sadness from you, to know that my loss, the loss of my father, and of my family, is shared by many others.

  “Here is another truth, though. I would have wished that my mother’s ceremony be a private one. I wanted to have just my family say good-bye. But call after call convinced me otherwise. You all wanted to come. And the fact is that a lot of you would not have listened to me had I told you no. You would have come anyway. So to tell you the truth, I am stuck with you. I’m trying to make the best of a less than desirable situation.

  “Tomorrow we will mourn and honor my mother. I want to emphasize this word ‘honor.’ It implies dignity. If my mother believed in anything, it was that, dignity. She expected me to rise up above ordinary behavior and behave in a civilized, dignified manner. To respect others. To live and think carefully. To use my mind in a productive way. Always.

  “Just two hours ago, at my mother’s house, all my fears that the presence of all of you would turn what should be a dignified event into a circus of craziness, all of my worries that the egotism of this group would simply not allow my mother’s funeral to be a source of comfort to those who loved her, rose up. I will not tolerate it. I deserve better. My father deserves better. My family deserves better. Do you understand?”

  Peter Orlansky stood up. He was an odd duck who never looked into anyone’s eyes, and true to form he looked down at his shoes as he spoke. I looked at him, so tall with broad shoulders. His black hair was still thick. The years had aged him less than most. “Sasha, we are all here to pay our respects. To honor your mother. To honor your family. Whatever you want, we will do.”

  “Good. What do I want, then? Tomorrow. I want you to sit down and stay down. I don’t want a word out of you. I don’t want any speeches from you. You will listen. You will sit as if there is glue on your feet. When it’s over, you will walk out quietly.”

  Zhelezniak then stood up. The entire room seemed to stiffen as it sensed his presence. He looked at me with his beagle eyes. “Professor Karnokovitch, I know we’ve never met. Excuse me for this indulgence. Your mother was no ordinary woman. In fact, there has never been a woman like her before in mathematics. Never. There may not be a woman like her again for hundreds of years. You probably know your mother and I were not friends. But the fact is that your mother was adored by all of us for her intellect, which was superior to all of ours. We will never see another mind like hers in our lifetime. Allow us the privilege to honor her as well.”

  “I heard something of this sort two hours ago.”

  “Otrnlov is crazy, Sasha,” Yakov said without standing, his voice booming in the hall. “Don’t confuse us with him. OK, I know none of us is really normal. But we are caring human beings just like you. It’s true we don’t deserve a part in this funeral. We know that. We’ll be happy
to just sit in our seats, glue on our feet if you want. But we are asking you to give us more. We would be grateful if you did. She is your mother, yes, we know. But we loved her, too. We would like to say good-bye to her in a respectful and dignified manner.”

  “There will be not a word from any mathematician save for my father, if he wishes, at the funeral.”

  “As you wish, Sasha. We understand,” Yakov said. “We’ve discussed this amongst ourselves. We don’t really need to say anything then. But we do need to mourn. And one day. Just one day. By Jewish law it isn’t enough. Some of us want to sit after.”

  “I’ve heard that you want to sit shiva with us. It’s an absurd idea.”

  “But as you said yourself, you can feel the sadness in this room,” Zhelezniak said. “We can all feel it. We have lost something truly magical and wonderful. It will take a long time to recover.”

  I looked at my father. I wanted to see something in his eyes, a recognition that he knew just how outrageous this request was. Instead he opened his mouth before I could say anything. “Not all of you are crazy, it’s true. A few of you were loved by my wife as if you were family. That’s true, too.”

  “Thank you, Viktor, for your understanding,” Peter Orlansky said. “It will just be six of us. We’ve decided amongst ourselves whom it will be.”

  “Six.” I sighed.

  “Technically, eight,” Yakov said. “We drew lots. The Karanskys. One of them drew for all three.”

  A trio stood up, all of them from New York City with full black beards. I knew them, had seen them last when I gave a talk at Columbia a few years back. The Karansky triplets. Three Israeli brothers, born in Minsk, with joint appointments at the Technion in Haifa and at the Courant Institute at NYU. All three specialized in partial differential equations, and they almost always published together. My mother had written recommendation letters for all of them, and positive tenure appointment letters as well. She had, for some reason, decided that not only were these three young men excellent mathematicians, but they were also worthy of entry into her small circle of professional confidants.