The Mathematician’s Shiva (8 page)

I sat in my office after the lecture, and started to cramp anew. Now I really understood why Kafka wrote on and on about his
kishkes
for so many pages in his diaries. Maybe he wasn’t simply being self-indulgent. He truly had serious physical troubles. But while I had Kafka’s body, I had none of his kvetchiness and probably none of his artistry. My grandfather was absolutely right. Could Kafka have written the series of partial differential equations that I had laid down for fifty minutes straight in a lecture hall? No way, no how. I was a problem solver, not a dweller on the topic of the human condition, which is after all an impossible problem to solve. I felt the twisting, turning, churning, and lurching in my lower abdomen—an unrelenting, dreadful ride on a rickety roller coaster—and while I tried to overcome the necessity of bending over and succumbing to the pain, thought of one word: “Metamucil.” They didn’t have such stuff in Kafka’s time, powdered fiber to mix with your orange juice to make your intestinal tract joyous.

That would do the trick, I was certain. Poor Kafka. No wonder he wrote such tortured material. Perhaps with enough Metamucil his writing would have been happier. Perhaps he wouldn’t have written at all. I woke up thinking of a happier Kafka, one my grandfather would approve of, one who wouldn’t steal my grandfather’s betrothed, and one who couldn’t possibly nourish the soul of a sixteen-year-old son of mathematicians stewing in his room.

W
e sat in the restaurant of our youth, a little acrid-smelling coffee shop where the china clanged constantly in the background, and ate our greasy breakfast.

“I can’t believe I ate this crap when I was young,” Bruce said.

“You were a little wide back then, too,” I said.

“You don’t need to remind me. I swear, a week here and no one in LA will even so much as say hi to me.”

“Well, the lighting is better in most of LA than here. It gives you a warmer glow. You’re staying the whole week?”

“Of course he is. I told him he had to,” Anna said. Bruce is the baby of the family. In this trio, I am the accommodating de facto middle brother and Anna is not only the family symbol of the folly and tragedy of the Soviet Union, but also the stronger and older sister. What she says goes almost always.

We were the younger generation of this small but never quiet family. This meant that in addition to being subservient to elders at all times, it was our job to decipher the mysterious and inexplicable ways of American culture in the day-to-day.

Here is an example. Suppose you are my uncle and are running a business, in this case a liquor business. In most countries this is a very corrupt enterprise. It’s that way in America, too. If you are a liquor distributor working your way up in the world, you need to somehow, obviously, distribute your liquor to retail shops and bars, otherwise you won’t make any money. Without distribution you are kaput, not a very inviting prospect.

Now suppose you are my uncle and have started this liquor distributorship from scratch. By clawing and pure luck—with the help of a tiny but enterprising brewery that wishes to expand its domain beyond its one tiny college town of Whitewater, Wisconsin—you hope to become something of a powerhouse. How do you do this?

My uncle struggled to get his beer into bars. His larger competitor kept him down. I suppose he could have, with some money, brought Slavic galoots from Chicago into town to force-feed the bars some Whitewater-produced beer, but for how long could such strong-arm tactics be successful? There had to be another way, a way supplied by an American-educated nephew. Through my uncle I am responsible, at the hormone-raging age of fifteen, for stealing an idea from Florida college spring breaks and bringing it to Wisconsin: the bikini contest.

“And college girls will do this? Wear next to nothing in a room full of drunk men?” my uncle asked in response to my suggestion on how to encourage bars to introduce his precious “imported” beer.

“Not at first, no. But you know, if you could find some girls, pay them at first, pretend college girls.”

“
Kurvehs
?”

“Yeah,
kurvehs
, but not like that. Not to, you know, do anything except wear bikinis.”

“Probably they’d do that for cheap. I could bring them up. From Chicago. A weekend. Winter when business is slow.”

“Plenty of
kurvehs
in Madison, I think.”

“I like the ones from Chicago better. They speak my language. Here they barely speak English even though they are native-born.”

That’s how my uncle’s business began to flourish, and such “creativity” on my part defined my role in my family as an ersatz American ambassador and interpreter. It became Bruce’s role later on. Anna’s specialty was the interpretation of all things about American women. At breakfast that morning we were trying to figure out how to keep my mother’s funeral from turning into a Russian theatrical tragedy.

“Your mother would have wanted a private ceremony, there is no doubt,” Anna said.

“My father says that’s impossible. He’s probably right. I have had I don’t know how many, maybe four hundred messages and e-mails, from every fucking mathematician on this planet. Even Zhelezniak called.”

“Who’s Zhelezniak?” Bruce asked.

“Vladimir Zhelezniak. Mother hated him.”

“Russian?”

“Of course he’s Russian, you idiot,” Anna said. “Who else is named Vladimir?”

“He was my mother’s mortal intellectual enemy,” I said.

“It wasn’t intellectual. It was personal,” Anna said.

“Personal. Now I’m interested,” Bruce said. “What did he do to Aunt Rachela?”

“It doesn’t matter. He’s the least of our troubles. Four hundred mathematicians, give or take, want to fly in. You’d think they’d come, cry, and just go back home. But no. They want to linger,” I said.

“Linger?” Bruce asked.

“Yeah, they want to sit shiva.”

“All four hundred?”

“No, they aren’t all Jewish, of course. But they all seem to know about sitting shiva. Or many do, at any rate.”

“They are worse than dancers. We know physical limitations, at least. The body doesn’t always do what we want. But these people. What do they know about what isn’t possible?” Anna asked.

“You were married to one. You should understand,” I said.

“So were you,” Anna said. “She call?”

“No.”

“She’s a strange one,” Anna said. “She must know.”

“Anyway, it’s not just the shiva. There are these crazy rumors about my mother working on a proof.”

“Navier-Stokes, I like how it flows off the tongue,” Bruce said.

“How did you know this?” I asked.

“My dad. He was always so proud of his sister. Plus, people have called me about it.”

“Who?”

“I don’t remember fucking names. But they called. My assistant answered. Always these buy-me-a-vowel names.”

“You should talk.”

“At least I have some e’s and an i. Some of those names, fuck, it’s like five or six consonants in a row. Besides, I’m a Charles now, not a Czerneski.”

“Did Otrnlov call?”

“Maybe. Who’s he?”

“You’ll see him. He’s crazier than crazy. He’s one of those who has asked if the casket will be open.”

“Why?”

“Why? I’ve tried to think why. I don’t think they want to see the body. They want to see what might be buried with the body.”

“What do you mean?”

“This rumor has gone into another dimension overnight. My mother has solved Navier-Stokes, supposedly, definitely. And in an act of complete selfishness she has decided to bury it with her.”

“Who can possibly think like this?” Anna asked.

“It’s something my mother apparently said at a conference once. She said . . . I don’t know exactly what actually. Something to the effect that if she would manage to solve Navier-Stokes, it would be for her own intellectual curiosity and development, not for any recognition. I don’t want them poking in my mother’s coffin trying to find a phantom manuscript. I don’t want them anywhere near her coffin, as a matter of fact.”

“It would be desirable to have some dignity,” Anna said.

“I’ll do whatever you want me to,” Bruce said.

“OK, four hundred people, perhaps, at this memorial service. They are all her children or relatives in some intellectual way. Plus the stupid governor wants to do something, but he will have to wait his turn. The coffin will be sealed. Those bastards’ imaginations can continue to run wild. I don’t care.”

“That’s a plan. I can work that plan. This is easy. You should try handling Streisand’s entourage.”

“You’re in charge of getting this thing together. The hall. The rabbi. It’s all yours,” I said to Bruce.

“It’s what I do best,” Bruce said, and for the first time since he arrived showed off his gleaming white teeth. He is not a man who likes to be idle, even in mourning.

“I know. Like your father,” I said.

“Y
ou’re tired, Sasha,” Anna said.

“Of course. It’s not like I didn’t expect this to happen. But when it does happen it’s a different story.”

“You know she was a great woman with a wonderful heart.”

“I know. But she’s gone. Absolutely gone. Fifty-one years of my life she was this undeniable presence. Now that space, everything about it, it’s not empty, but it’s not the same. It’s not, I don’t know, glowing like it did. Shit, I know I must be feeling bad. I’m speaking in metaphors. Who does that except the depressed or overbearing?”

“She was really a mother to me, too.”

We were walking in Vilas Park, a short distance from my mother’s bungalow. Bruce was on the phone arranging every detail imaginable, leaving nothing for anyone else to do. Even the head of the funeral home was left mostly idle. Bruce had looked at the casket his father and I had picked out and given it thumbs-down because of its excessive gleam. “Too Vegas,” he said. “My aunt was not that kind of woman.”

Bruce was having a casket shipped from Chicago that had been inspected by a friend. The flowers were being driven in from Chicago as well. At his father’s behest, Bruce was also taking over organizing the governor’s planned memorial service at the end of the month. Bruce adored my mother. He, in fact, had lived in our home for a year when I was already grown and living in Tuscaloosa.

Bruce would not be the only child to occupy that room after me. My mother was in the habit of picking up strays of all kinds, dogs, cats, birds, and, for brief periods, even the occasional wayward child.

Of course, there was Pascha the parrot, an African gray. She had been sitting on her perch in the kitchen ever since I went to high school in Chicago. All these decades and this bird was still living, fastidiously cleaning its feathers, and occasionally chattering in the high Polish of my mother’s youth. My mother had a gift for nurturing those she deemed worthy.

Perhaps her greatest nurturing project of all was Anna, who, on the face of it, needed little care. She was a grown woman of twenty-one when she defected. Like my mother and many others, she had been picked by the Soviet system at an early age to use her talent for the glory of Russia. The Soviets were exemplary at finding and nurturing this 0.001 percent of the population with artistic and intellectual skills. Sadly they also sent a stream of the grown ones to prison and sometimes death for no reason, except, of course, extreme paranoia.

For decades they were on the phone frequently, my mother and Anna. My mother dispensed advice, only some of which was heeded. “You spend too much time worrying about men, Anna. They are all alike. Pretty boring, really. Just pick one and keep him,” she said to her more than once.

Anna was born not in Russia but in Uzbekistan, and was orphaned at the age of three. Usually, people like this never thought of defecting. Stalin and the Soviet system were their parents, good parents who had brought them up with pride and discipline. They gave them a sweet life in Moscow far afield from the destitution of their youth. But Anna was different.

I could sense her will, her inability to go with the flow, early on when she lived with us that first summer. Russian men came to us from Chicago and the East Coast with sincere efforts to chart her course in the artistic world of the United States. Their eyes gleamed with the expectation of something intimate in exchange. She swatted them away without any pretense of being polite. If they persisted, she’d roll out the insults. “
Da poshel ty na kher so svoim utiugom
[Get the hell out of here and don’t forget to take your dick with you].”

She was going to make her own way in this new world. Born in 1941, she had never known who her father was, but her blue eyes indicated clearly that he was not an Uzbek. Her silhouette, wiry, also told anyone who paid attention to such things that she was partly of foreign blood. “I could be Jewish like you,” she once said to me. “You never know. There were all kinds of people in Uzbekistan during the war. The first time I met your mother and looked into her eyes, I felt something special. Like we belonged together.” My mother believed much the same thing.

We walked hand in hand, like we were young again, along the path into the little local zoo. “It’s hard for me,” Anna said. “I could tell your mother anything.”

“You can tell me anything, too,” I said.

“No, you’re a man. It’s different. Yeah, I can tell you. But listening. You don’t hear what your mother heard.”

“Yeah, it’s true.” I looked at the scene in front of us, a strange mix of African savanna and crusty snow. “We’re kind of like these monkeys. It’s fucking cold. It’s fucking sad.”

“I would come to this zoo a lot when I first came here,” Anna said. “Maybe because of what your mother told me when I first met her. In Russia, I was like a cat in a cage.”

“She was never too subtle about Russia, was she? She’d come here, too, especially in winter. Watch the bears.”

“It’s funny, the bears,” Anna said. “We spent so many years killing them all off and now we save a few just to lord over them. It’s a sick affair when you think about it.”

We made our way over to the bear display. I waved my hand to them in a mock show of kinship. “At least these aren’t freezing like the African charismatic megafauna,” I said. “Sure, they are behind a wall. They don’t get enough exercise. But they get all the food they need. Pampered, with servants, really. This is kind of like a resort for them. Probably they get on the scale at night and worry about their weight.”

“You don’t know anything about it, Sasha. You never were caged in your life. Don’t be silly. But your mother did like bears, it’s true. It’s a Russian thing, I guess. I like them, too. Another thing you couldn’t possibly understand.”

“My passport says I fully understand. Plus, I’m good at clichés.”

“It’s cliché because it’s true. Maybe you do understand. Your accent is shit, though. Even in Uzbekistan they probably still speak Russian better than you.”

“Yeah, probably. Look at that one over there.”

“The light brown one? With the missing fur?”

“Yeah, that one. Mangy or something. That was Mother’s favorite. We’d come here before her chemotherapy sessions. She’d stand and watch him carefully. I swear he’d watch her back.”

“He’s watching you now.”

“Maybe he’s watching both of us,” I said. “I’m sorry to inform you, dear bear, but your number one fan will not be coming to see you again.”

“Now you’re talking to a bear instead of me?”

“He’s a Kodiak. Probably in the old days, the Russians up there in Alaska, they talked to his ancestors. I’m continuing a proud tradition.”

“If you had children, you wouldn’t be talking to bears. You’d be with someone fresh and young, someone with a little of your mother inside. A new generation.”

“I have a child.”

She rolled her eyes. “Like you even know him or her.”

“Anna, you know you’re making me feel bad, right?”

“I’m not trying to do that. I’m trying to talk sense to you when your guard is down. You still have time. You’re still young. People live forever nowadays. Find yourself someone already. It’s well past ridiculous.”

“What is ridiculous?”

“I’ve been married three times. I have both two children and two grandchildren.”

“And a third grandchild will come sometime this month, although I shouldn’t congratulate you before it happens.”

“No, you shouldn’t.”

“Is this some sort of race?”

“No, it’s not a race. But I lived. I didn’t stop. I had my work, sure. But I tell you, even today at my age, I know that I am still capable of falling in love completely, openly. You are, too.”

“Now you’re talking nonsense.”

“No, you’re the one talking to bears. I’m talking to you. Look at me, Sasha.” She pulled the arms of my topcoat, turning me toward her. She was still strong. My shoulders lurched forward. “Look at me, not the stupid bear.”

I looked down at her. I hadn’t looked at anyone like that in years. It’s not like I hadn’t been up close to a woman. If anything, I’d seen far too many faces.

I wasn’t looking at Anna like I did at other women. I wasn’t trying to determine the precise spot on her skin that needed a touch of my fingertips. No, I was looking at someone whose face I already knew well but through age and time looked both familiar and strangely new. I took it all in the way, perhaps, someone takes in new scenery as they cross over a hill on a day when the sun’s light is just so, exposing every detail.

There was a little scar above Anna’s right eye, just a light-colored line on her otherwise olive skin that even when she was young would form into a wrinkle when she raised her brow. She didn’t know how she got it, she said. There were her rounded cheekbones, oddly similar to those of my mother, high on her face and broad as if they were specifically designed to allow her cheeks to be warmed by the sun. I knew these features well. I could have recalled them any time I wished. But there were also the shadows and lines that had developed over time, different than mine, finer and deeper etches along the lids of her eyes, furrows where there had once been the subtlest pair of curves accentuating her chin and lips.

“You’re smiling at me,” I said.

“It feels good to smile. I didn’t know until recently.”

“You’re becoming an American, it seems.”

“No, never. Not that. It’s good to be here, though. You’re the American, not me.”

“Not really.”

“Maybe not really. Not among women.”

“How am I with women?”

“Big phony. A Russian accent comes out of nowhere. Your eyes droop sad like a puppy. I know you.”

“You’re amused by my behavior, are you?”

“Yes, very amused. Was at any rate. But don’t you think it’s getting old? Tell me true now.”

“And what about you. Three husbands. Five years and then what, poof? You throw them out.”

“That’s over. I’m going to find myself a real man, successful, and hold onto him no matter what. I’m getting too old to be alone. Look at me. I’m telling the truth.”

“You are. I can see it. I really can. I guess I’ll be going to a wedding soon.”

“One more, yes. I want a big one. One last big wedding.”

“Could be you and me.”

“That’s disgusting. Incest almost. Your mother wouldn’t approve. I’m going to find someone who knows he’s getting something special.”

“The bear is what’s watching us, not my mother.”

“Forget the bear. You and your fucking bear. Smile for me, Sasha.”

“Like this?”

“No, not like that. That’s stupid. A real smile. Not some fake thing. I’ve seen you do it. I know you can do it.”

“I need to think of something good, Anna.” I closed my eyes and tried to conjure up something that would make me smile the way that I knew Anna wanted me to. “Tell me what to think.”

“I don’t know. Maybe the pond over there next to the road. Where we used to go sometimes that first winter, when you were little. You’d put on your skates in the warming house and then show me how good you were on the ice. Little boy showing off. Remember?”

“Yeah, sure, I remember.”

“I’d watch you skate. You were so happy. That’s the kind of smile I want to see.”

I concentrated as best I could. The cold air is, indeed, ideal for isolating thoughts and maybe even acting on them, if not physically, at least emotionally and mentally. In my mind I was a kid skating backward on the ice, knowing someone beautiful was giving me a visual embrace. What boy wouldn’t smile in response to that?

“That was better,” Anna said. “I saw the little boy in you. It was nice to see. No disappointments. A big future ahead of you.”

“My future turned out quite well. I don’t have many disappointments. It’s true, don’t you think?”

“Sure. You did what your mother wanted. What your father wanted. I’m not sure you’ve done what you wanted.”

“My father wanted me to become a mathematician. I disobeyed him.”

“And your mother? Did you ever disobey her?”

“Who could ever disobey her? She was in charge of it all. Me, you, my father, Shlomo, Bruce, everybody. She was the boss. You don’t disobey the boss.”

“Well, maybe now you can be your own boss.”

“I could be independently employed, it’s true. But you’re the one sounding like the boss now. You wanted me to smile for you. I smiled. What do you want next?”

“OK, if I’m the boss, will you listen to me?”

“I’ve been listening to you since I was a boy. I’m certainly not going to stop now.”