The Mathematician’s Shiva Page 17

  “You’re a brave one, little girl,” he said. “What are you doing way out here?”

  I looked at him carefully. His skin was dark, weathered, and full of pockmarks. With his moonlike face, he looked like he was from the East. My blond hair was in braids, so he couldn’t see its curl. My face doesn’t hold a hint of my religion but instead tells anyone who pays attention to such things that I come from the Russian steppes. I am a good mimic, and in the short time I had lived in Russia, had quickly shed my Polish accent. I sounded like a little Russian girl. People would tease me about how Russian I had become.

  I held up the remaining bulb in my hand. “I was harvesting these.”

  He smiled at me. “You cook them, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Smart girl. You learn fast. You won’t get rickets if you eat them.” He looked at the bear on the ground a meter away. “But a bear,” he said. “Eating bear meat is even better. The big ones are greasy and horrible, but the young ones are tasty.”

  He approached the cub, a knife in hand. “You need to grow big and strong,” he said to me. “When the war is over, we’ll need young people like you. Who knows how many of us will be left?” He pulled out a canvas sack from a bag, thought for a moment, and then pulled out another. “I’ll tell you what, little girl. You were so brave that I will share this with you. Have you ever dressed a bear?”

  “No, sir, but I have a knife. I can learn.”

  “Let me see your knife, little girl.” I knew that I didn’t have a choice, that I had to give my knife to him. “This?” He laughed out loud. “This can barely cut bread. I have something better that you can use.” He pulled another shiny blade from his pack. “The bloody insects will be all over us if we take too long. We need to hurry. I’ll cut out the entrails. Then you watch me cut on one side. When I leave, you take what’s left. OK?”

  “But what about your knife?”

  “Keep it, little girl. You might need it again.”

  I watched him carefully. He was so efficient and practiced. He placed the meat chunks in his sack and prepared to walk off. “Don’t show anyone what you have, little girl,” he told me. “They’ll take it from you. They might take your life to get it.” He pulled out a little paper box from his bag and threw it toward me. It landed at my feet. “Salt,” he said. “Your mother will know what to do with it.”

  My first thought was to tell him that I had no mother. But then I decided that her death was irrelevant to the situation. I watched him walk away and then began to cut as quickly as I could, ignoring the blood on my hands and on my blouse and skirt. I was amazed by the sharpness of the knife he gave me. I’d never held a blade that could cut with such ease. I can’t explain it, but I felt something take over me then, like I was someone different than an eleven-year-old girl. Rather, I was someone older who had been in the wild before, and I felt a rhythm take over as I cut and put the strips of meat into the sack.

  The man had been right. The bugs were awful, flying around me and then biting. There weren’t just mosquitoes, which were always present, but also little black flies that bit ferociously, pinching my skin in a way that seemed to find every nerve ending. I ignored them as best I could and kept filling my sack with raw meat. I sliced along the rib cage of this animal with whom, less than a half hour before, I had felt a kinship.

  When the sack was so full that I knew it would be all I could carry—it must have weighed fifteen kilos at least—I stopped and began to walk back. I found a nearby tiny stream and did my best to clean myself off.

  We ate meat for the first time in eight months that night. My father was worried that others would detect the smell if we cooked the bear meat on an open flame, so we boiled it instead. It tasted sweet, like cow tongue in a way, but the texture was far less firm.

  I told my father what happened, although I didn’t tell him about my emotional attachment to the bear. He looked astonished when I told him how I had cut into the bear myself. “The man is right. The knife will be useful. Even tonight I can use it,” my father said. “You have been quite a brave young woman,” he said and he looked at me in a way that I had never seen him look at me before. It was not like I was a girl, but rather like I was his equal. That night was a turning point.

  My stomach was full for the first time in a long while. Afraid that we would get sick, we both made sure not to eat too much. But I had dreams that night, crazy dreams one after another. I could feel my mind waking from its hunger-imposed slumber. In one of those dreams, the cub and I stood a short distance apart, just like in the fen, and looked at each other. A bulb was in the cub’s paw and he was holding it like it was a toy ball. “I like playing with you,” he said to me in a squeaky voice, almost like Mickey Mouse. “I haven’t played with anyone in such a long time.”

  PART 3

  SITTING SHIVA

  CHAPTER 20

  The Story Hour

  DAY 1

  “This is wonderful,” Yakov said, slurping up the cabbage borscht with a big silver spoon at the kitchen table. “Have you had any?”

  “Me? Not yet,” I said.

  “And the golubsti, my lord, who brought this?”

  “Jenny. She came about an hour ago.”

  “Which one was Jenny? Redheaded woman?”

  “Yeah, that was her.”

  “Nice-looking woman. Cooks like this, too. Amazing.” He stabbed at a golubets, piercing its cabbage skin, and took a taste. “This is heaven. You should try.”

  He took another stab with his fork and pointed it my way. I had a taste, the sour salt summoning old memories. Fuck Proust and his madeleine. If he had been born a Slav, he would have grown up eating something far superior to butter cookies, his memories would have been fuller, and by god he would have been an even better writer.

  “Not bad,” I said.

  “Not bad? Are you kidding me? Fifteen years I’ve been living in this country, and I haven’t had anything as good, I swear.”

  “Well, you have been in Nebraska.”

  “Exactly. You were spoiled here, Sasha. Your mother and aunt Zloteh cooking for you, the best food in the world. Now they’re both gone. You’ll see what it’s like.”

  “How many pounds have you put on since you’ve been in this country, Yakov?”

  “Shut up. It’s what they feed you in this godforsaken place. It turns you into a cow. If I were in this city, I’d be skinny again. You can’t get fat on golubsti.”

  “Depends on how many you stuff in your face, Yakov. You’re steaming up the windows, you’re eating so much. You’re on number three.”

  “I’m glad I came here. I was feeling miserable in Lincoln. Lonely. You walk out of the math building and there’s a fifty-point IQ cliff.”

  “I can hear the violins. If you were in Russia, you wouldn’t have a job of any sort. You’d be struggling for food, looking for used shoes that fit you halfway decently, and there would be no IQ cliff, because you’d be spending your time twenty-four/seven with people who can’t handle their vodka and who can barely add six and seven together.”

  “Thank you for the much-needed perspective, Sasha.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “See, this is what I miss. Real people. Real food. How do you stand it in Tuscaloosa, anyway?”

  “It’s fifty degrees in Tuscaloosa right now. I wear a light sweater to work. I don’t have to dress like I’m Nanook of the North. Madison is overrated.”

  “Not with me, it isn’t. I would move here in an instant if I could. People like your father around. People who can understand me. Understand math. And I could chase after someone like Jenny, eat healthy and well, lose this big tire around my waist, and be happy. I saw she didn’t have a wedding ring. I notice these things.”

  “Between you and me, I don’t think Jenny Rivkin is going to move to Lincoln, Nebraska, with her two children just so she
can cook for you.”

  “She American?” Yakov sounded hopeful for a negative answer.

  “Yes.”

  “Parents, too?”

  “I think so, yes. Actually, I know so.”

  “You’re right, not very likely.” Yakov sighed.

  Pascha, the African gray, squawked in a corner of the kitchen. “What did the bird say?”

  “It’s Polish.”

  “I know it’s Polish, but what exactly?”

  “She said, ‘It has a singularity.’”

  “She always talks mathematics?”

  “No. She has a few hundred words. An assortment.”

  “Not a word in Russian?”

  “Not a word. Mostly Polish. A little Hebrew.”

  “Hmmm. Your mother must have talked to her a lot over the years.” Yakov stopped eating for a moment and contemplated who knows what.

  There were more than twenty people in my mother’s modest house on the day of the funeral. The men, more plentiful in number, had taken over the living room. The women were in the dining room. The kitchen was a neutral zone where the hungry, bored, or those who didn’t want to talk about mathematics or family matters would meet. Eva Steinberg, the former student of my mother, walked in as Yakov chowed down again, lost in the revelry of his taste buds.

  “So much food,” Eva said.

  “The Sisterhood loved my mother.”

  “You have no idea how good this food is,” Yakov said. “Exquisite.”

  “I’m going to get fat. It’s going to be like being on a cruise,” Eva said, picking up a lemon bar from a tray.

  My mother worked, like her mentor, in many different fields in mathematics. But everyone at the shiva, with the exception of Zhelezniak, who like my mother was wide-ranging in his intellect, and my father, who was a number theorist, worked principally on the theory of partial differential equations. At first I considered it fortuitous that it had worked out this way. While mathematicians can be expected to be difficult and unsuitable for human interaction even with other mathematicians, PDE people, as they are sometimes known for short, are certainly among the most normal of the lot. Topologists, for what it’s worth, are the worst. Getting out of bed for them might be the most manageable obstacle of the day. OK, I’m being a little pissy on this point. Catherine, my ex, had been studying topology with my mother.

  Eva knew Yakov well enough, I was certain. Everyone in the field of PDEs knew him, not so much because of his accomplishments—which were significant—but because he had a pathological need to talk and would do so with anyone. The more positive way of saying this was that Yakov, unlike most of us, genuinely loved people.

  “What are the women doing, Eva?” he asked.

  “Telling stories, mostly. About Rachela. Andrea is very interested. And that little one, Amy, is a very smart girl.”

  “The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree,” Yakov said.

  “No, I mean really smart. She’s already studying.”

  “Mathematics?” I asked.

  “Of course mathematics, Sasha,” Eva said.

  “With her landlord?”

  “Yes, he’s a fine man. I’ve met him in Berkeley.”

  “She’s six years old,” I said.

  “So,” my father piped in as he walked into the kitchen. “I started with you when you were five. Like you, I can tell there is something really there. A certain depth of understanding. And unlike you, she doesn’t have the distraction of having to adapt to a completely different culture.”

  “You’ve seen your great-granddaughter for less than a day and already you know so much, do you?”

  “I think your father is right,” Eva said.

  “Are you going to be pulling out the notebooks for her tonight? Give her the old lessons?”

  “I wish. It was good for you. It would be good for her, too. But I think I’ll leave that job to Shackleworth in Berkeley. For now, at any rate.” My father flashed a smile and poured himself some tea. He was drying himself out, I could tell. Even I wasn’t drinking as per usual. The mathematicians, however, were another story entirely.

  I walked into the dining room. The women were seated around the table. This was like old times, people eating, drinking, and schmoozing. I did miss it. All these smart people in one place, not afraid to show their intellect, were enjoying the company of their fellow brainiacs with the warmth induced by alcohol. Anna was at the head, holding court. She was already drunk, a cheery kind of drunk. She was not melancholy or morose at all, but the way she was when she had an opportunity to perform. Many years ago, when she danced in New York, a Times critic praised her for her “waiflike piquancy with a delicate sparkle.” The waif was gone, but the sparkle would never leave her.

  “Seven years ago, I was invited by the Bolshoi for a party to honor me, of all things. I couldn’t believe it. It had been over thirty years since I had left. I thought they had completely erased me from their memory. But no, they wanted me to come for the thirty-fifth anniversary of my stage debut. I think they really wanted to see how old and ugly I’d become, to tell you the truth, but I didn’t care about that. I said yes immediately. When I mentioned it to Rachela, she said she wanted to come, too.”

  “When she told me she was going, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” I said.

  “You should have come with us. She wanted that, you know. You could have seen your hometown.”

  “I thought it would be better for it to be a girls-only trip. Plus, it was hurricane season. I was busy.” The thought of going back to Moscow had actually filled me with dread.

  “Rachela was so excited to travel, as was I. I felt young again. I looked younger, too. I could feel it. And it was so good to be there with Rachela, someone who understood what I felt and who felt the same way.

  “We went to the party and they tried to show off for me. I understood then that it wasn’t curiosity that made them invite a retired dancer back home. They wanted a good word or two said about them abroad. This was the new Russia, they were trying to convince me. It was true, the party was indeed wonderful. The caviar, the champagne, everyone dressed in clothes they couldn’t have possibly bought before the 1990s. It was fun. I had my revenge, too, the revenge of living a good life for so many years. I really did look good that night. I could see the looks of envy on the faces of people I knew back in the old days. And Rachela, when she wanted to, she could charm anyone. She impressed everyone that night. Her Russian was always so perfect and formal, free of any slang. Even the head of the Bolshoi was captivated by her. He knew without being told that he was talking to someone important.”

  “I can well imagine,” Patricia O’Connell said. “It was like being around royalty sometimes, even when she was speaking in English.”

  “True. She understood about having a look. Having presence. People in America don’t understand. But in Russia we know. Lots of places understand this. Not here. Anyway, we went to see the grave of Kolmogorov. She wanted to pay her respects. It was so beautiful with flowers. And visiting his grave brought back all kinds of memories for her. I said he looked like a kind man, and she said that he was like a second father to her.”

  “Did you go to the university, too?”

  “Oh, definitely. I thought it was funny. She didn’t want to tell them she was coming. Not at first. We walked into the mathematics building like we were strangers. Rachela had her hair in a scarf, I remember. It was a lovely scarf that I bought her in Rome many years ago. I was flattered that she was wearing it. But it was a sunny summer day, very warm and muggy for Moscow. There was no need to wear it, and she did have such beautiful hair, always.”

  “She didn’t want to be recognized,” I said. “That’s what she told me when she came back home.”

  “I thought as much. We walked into the building to her old office. She knocked on the door and no one a
nswered. Here’s something funny, though. She still had a key. She took it out of her purse and it still worked. I couldn’t believe it. She said Kolmogorov’s office was down the hall. She remembered correctly. There was a plaque honoring him outside his door.”

  “No plaque for Rachela, though, I’m sure,” Yakov said, walking in.

  “Oh no, definitely not.”

  “What did she do in her office?” Yakov asked.

  “We walked in. She talked about how good it had been to be a student. How she wished she could be a student again. All those smart people. All those new ideas in that one room. It was heaven, she said.”

  “Czerneski, Poponov, Glizsky, all in that one office. Can you imagine?” Yakov said. “It was heaven, she was right. And now they’re all gone. There will never be such a group of brains in one building, much less one room, ever again.”

  “She said much the same thing while we stood there,” Anna said. “Then she told me to stand outside her old office. She had to do something, she said. If anyone came, I should knock on the door to tell her. No one came. Maybe I was out there for three minutes. Rachela then walked out. We went to the restroom to tidy ourselves. She took off her scarf then and made sure she looked nice. Then we walked to the main office of the building and introduced ourselves. The chairman of the department walked out to greet us. You could tell he was shocked.”

  “What was she doing in her office?” Patricia asked.

  “I don’t know. It wasn’t my business,” Anna said.

  “My mother liked her secrets,” I said.

  “Zhelezniak said she was known for hiding things. Poponov and Glizsky told him about this, I think. People found some papers of hers in that office years later, he said. Maybe she was looking for something she hid long ago,” Yakov said.

  “She didn’t tell me anything,” Anna said. “I didn’t ask either. But when we went into the chairman’s office, he recognized her immediately. People from all over the building came out of their offices when they heard the news that Rachela was there. Everyone wanted a peek, and the looks in their eyes told me everything I needed to know and everything Rachela needed to know. The admiration in that crowded room and in the hallway outside was something you could feel. I felt so proud of her. Sasha, you really should have been there. You would have been proud, too.”