The Mathematician’s Shiva (27 page)

DAY 7

M
y mother had been dead for only a week and her absence was like the disappearance of a huge planet. The moons that had revolved around her were undergoing a great realignment. An aunt, certainly my mother’s least favorite moon, left her orbit altogether. Another moon, one long favored by my mother, quickly began a cozy intricate dance along my aunt’s former astronomical path with a third, also favored, moon. I am, I know, going too far with metaphor here, and am also greatly distorting real physics. But as my cousin had predicted, the intricate dance was taking place not at my uncle’s house, which Anna did truly detest, but at the tried-and-true location of many high-end Madison trysts, the Edgewater Hotel.

While my cousin certainly wasn’t surprised by this development, we were both taken aback by just how indiscreet my uncle and Anna were about it. “After this damn memorial ceremony, I’m selling everything and moving to California,” my uncle said.

We were sitting at the dining room table, having our last meal together in my mother’s house. My father was at the head of the table, my uncle was at the other end. Anna was sitting next to my uncle, holding his hand. This kind of public display of affection in my family was completely foreign. My cousin and I sat together on the east side of the table just like in the old days.

“Where in California, exactly?” I asked.

“Los Angeles, of course. Anna is there. My son is there. For sixty years I’ve been freezing my bones. For twenty, I’ve been a lost soul. I’m done with that.”

“You’re not moving in with me,” Anna said. “I don’t like freeloaders.” The warm tone in her voice as she scolded him was uncharacteristic, and my uncle seemed to like it.

“Not with me, either,” Bruce said, with a look of genuine fear at the prospect of once again sharing a home with his father.

“I’m buying my own place, don’t worry,” my uncle said.

“You can come for visits then,” Anna said.

“Sure, you can visit me, too, just so long as you call ahead,” Bruce said.

“I won’t have to call ahead for Anna.”

“No. I don’t have anything to hide,” Anna said. “But with Bruce, I can tell you, you don’t want to come unexpected.”

“So important and special, he thinks his life is. I already know those secrets of his. They were a big deal once. Now even on TV they show it.”

“On TV it’s different. It’s all in the details,” Anna said.

“I suppose you’re right.”

“If there is a heaven,” Anna said, “Rachela is smiling right now.”

“If the Christians are right, Zloteh is smiling, too,” my uncle said.

“You think Zloteh is happy seeing us two together?” Anna asked.

“Definitely. She wouldn’t want me to be alone. She would want me happy. Plus, she even liked you.”

“I’m not going back to the office tomorrow,” my father announced. “I can’t face the sight of another mathematician. Six days in my old house with them was enough. I need a change of scenery to finish up my project.”

“Where are you going to go, Father?” I asked.

“Tuscaloosa, of course. I’ve been looking online. It seems like a very pretty city. It’s warm this time of year, is my understanding. There is even a nice river that flows through it. Your house is next to it. I saw it on MapQuest.”

“Do you mean the Warrior?” I asked.

“Yes, a strange name for a river. Black Warrior, too.”

“North of Tuscaloosa it’s the Warrior. South it’s the Black Warrior. You’re inviting yourself to my house, are you?”

“I’ve never been. It’s time I see it, don’t you think?” My father looked at me, trying to gauge my level of warmth toward his proposal.

“It’s as good a time as any, I guess,” I said.

“You can work in the front of his office,” my uncle said. “Very nice. The department secretary is down the hall and will always make sure you get your tea and donuts.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere near a university. I’ll work in my son’s house.”

“You’ll be working on Navier-Stokes, I suppose,” I said.

“There won’t be any surprises in your house, will there?” my father asked. “I can just walk in, unpack, and work, yes? No naked women. No naked men. No dogs. No cats. No parrots.”

“No. No surprises. And I’m not taking Pascha with me. Orlansky asked me if he could have her, and they seem to get along quite well. They will speak a beautiful Polish together. But you didn’t answer my question.”

“Why should I answer that? You already know the answer.”

I shook my head and tried my best to be a scold. “For six days you let two dozen mathematicians go on a wild-goose chase in this house trying to solve a problem that you already solved. Is that right?”

“It’s not solved. Well, it is. But I’m making sure it’s one hundred percent correct. Technically, until I do that, the Navier-Stokes problem is still unsolved. And I didn’t solve it. Your mother did.”

“Why?”

“Why did I let them work so hard? It was your mother. I was honoring her wish that they have a chance to solve it. One last chance.”

“But she solved this problem in what, 1945 or so?”

“I don’t know when she solved it. But she told me she started it a little before then, yes. How did you know?”

“It’s in her memoir, the one I talked about at the funeral.”

“I wasn’t listening to your speech,” my father said.

“I didn’t listen either,” my uncle said.

“I worked hard on that thing.”

“It was for other people to hear, not us. We already knew Rachela’s story,” my father said.

“The memoir is handwritten in Polish. She kept sending me chapters. Two weeks ago she sent me a bundle of them. In one she talks about solving this problem, among other things,” I said.

“I didn’t have a clue.” My father smiled. “Polish, really?”

“Do you know how hard it has been for me to read? Like walking through sticky, deep mud. Without a dictionary, it would be impossible.”

“Give it to me. I’ll translate it,” my uncle said.

“She always had her secrets,” my father said.

“So, apparently, did you,” I said.

“It wasn’t my secret. Two week ago, she asked me to visit. She told me to go upstairs, that there was something there for me in Aaron’s old room. She gave me instructions on how to find it. Just like with the gold, I needed a screwdriver. I found the package of papers. I brought them downstairs. We looked at them in her bed. That was the first time I knew.”

“So it could have been 1945 when she solved it,” I said.

“A proof like this? No, that’s impossible. She mapped out much of it by then. I think maybe 1970 or so was when she finished it. That’s my guess. Even for her it would have been a twenty-year problem at least. After she didn’t win the Fields she was mad as hell. She didn’t care about awards at all after that. We even had to work hard to get her to pick up that medal from Clinton. She didn’t want to go.”

“Why keep it a secret, though?”

“She wanted to solve it from start to finish. Completely by herself and for herself. It was the problem, I’m sure, she thought she was meant to solve. I don’t think even Kolmogorov knew about it. She started working on this a little in 1940 with Grozslev. Kolmogorov published part of that work entirely as his own. She wasn’t happy about that at all. Probably she started to hide this work then. I was married to her for over fifty years and I didn’t know.”

“So it’s complete?”

“I think so, yes, but I’m still checking. Another two weeks and I’ll be sure.”

“Do you have it with you? I’d like to see it.”

“It’s in my house. We can stop by after we make the last walk for the shiva. I can give it to you then. I’ll give you the original. You’re her son, after all.”

“You have a copy, too?”

“Yes, of course, as a precaution.”

“What are the odds that there is an error, Father?”

“Zero. But still I need to check.” My father poured his glass full and lifted it up high. “Every one of you played a role in this achievement. You don’t think you did, but every one of you was important. You sustained my Rachela, you gave her encouragement, you made her happy, you gave her joy. I want to make a toast to all of you in her memory. This proof is a singular achievement. No one will do anything as great again. But it wouldn’t have been possible without the family she loved so much.”

We drank to my mother’s proof, and then we drank again, too much as per usual. Everyone seemed to be happy about this turn of events. They had grown so completely inured to my mother’s craziness over the years that this last trespass—keeping a secret even though it might cause troubles beyond her death for those she loved—was, to them, nothing out of the ordinary. My father was joyful, above all, about being associated with a major mathematical discovery. By the time the old guys came from the synagogue for the final prayer, including the Cohanim
from the night before, we were all pretty far gone. The old guys wished us long and happy years as we shared some of our schnapps with them, sending us a little further down the slope.

We bundled ourselves up and began the final task of the shiva, the ceremonial walk around the block. There we were, all five of us in our heaviest coats, walking by house after house. I’m sure none of the people in those houses had the slightest idea why we were out and about in that cold.

For almost fifty years my mother’s neighborhood, a place where few faculty members lived, had been my touchstone. There was no grandeur in this neighborhood’s homes, built in the 1920s mostly to house the families of civil servants. They were all utilitarian, designed to shelter those without pretensions. For my mother and father, it was heaven in comparison to what they had in Russia, and they didn’t feel a need for anything more.

As a child I could have told you the names of all of my neighbors, and they all pretty much knew mine as well. For the ones who didn’t keep track of children’s names, I was simply “that little Russian boy,” a moniker that thankfully, during the Cold War, did not seem to cause me too much trouble. In our neighborhood, what truly mattered was not where you were from or your line of work or your religion, but simply your willingness to follow through on the community obligation to mow your lawn regularly in the summer and promptly shovel your sidewalk clear after every snowstorm in the winter. On that front, thanks to my father’s fastidiousness, we always passed with flying colors.

The four people around me on the sidewalk were the ones I would always love. We would scream at each other now and then, sure. We would insult each other habitually as well. This is who we were, raw and emotional and confident that no matter how awful our behavior to each other on the surface, we belonged together, and ultimately needed each other always.

Now there was also a daughter and granddaughter, at least peripherally, in my life. I had no idea where that would lead. I would reach out to them. I would try to love them. But with those two there would be different rules that I would have to follow. They wouldn’t understand this constant testing and jabbing that were so intrinsic to the world in which I grew up. I would have to be nicer on the surface. I would have to watch what I said. I thought of those two far away in California. Even if I did succeed with them and find love, they would certainly always be distant physically. I needed something more in my life, something closer and immediate.

“We need to buy something in a store owned by a gentile,” my uncle said, as we were about to make the final turn back home. “It’s the tradition.”

“It will be another six blocks of walking. You’ve got to be kidding,” my father said.

“Look, you don’t have to go,” my uncle said. “You’re not even Jewish.”

“I’ll go, I’ll go,” my father said. “But promise me one thing. When I die, just put me in the ground. No shiva. No nothing. No stupid superstitions about buying things from gentiles to fool the devil, OK?”

“Yeah, that’s OK, Viktor. I don’t mind. It’s what you want. But right now we’re going to do things the right way.”

After we made our purchase, we went to my father’s house, where I picked up the original proof. My uncle Shlomo, Anna, and Bruce then drove off in my uncle’s car as I walked inside my mother’s house alone. I placed the proof on the dining room table, walked upstairs to find the chapters of my mother’s memoir that I had translated during the shiva, and walked back down to the dining room. There they were, the documents that defined her life, handwritten, side-by-side on top of the weathered mahogany grain.

My mother was a careful writer, I noted. There were few corrections in either document. She thought through things fully before she wrote anything down on paper. In some ways, both of these manuscripts were opaque to me. I picked up the papers and rubbed them a bit between my fingers, trying to feel closer to them, my mother’s life works.

My father knocked on the door as I held the papers in my hands. He didn’t bother to wait for me to answer, entered quickly, and looked at me, still in the dining room. “I had second thoughts about giving you that proof, Sasha,” he said.

“Well, here it is,” I said. I held it up for him to see. “What did you think I was going to do, burn it in the fireplace?”

“Maybe. I had thoughts of doing that myself early on. It’s been hell trying to check that proof. It isn’t my field.”

“It’s been like hell translating her memoir, too. Polish isn’t my field of expertise, either.”

“Let me see
your
papers, Sasha.” I handed him the thick stack of unlined copy paper held together with a fat rubber band. He sat down next to me at the dining room table, pulled off the rubber band, and shook his head. “This would be worse for me, that’s for certain. All that emoting in a language I barely understand.”

“She gave a dog’s breakfast to both of us.”

“Maybe, but you know if it wasn’t for her we’d still be in a tiny apartment in Moscow. So we owe her this.”

“Father, she abandoned us, plain and simple.”

“No, that’s not true. She forced us to come here because she knew it would be best for us all. She helped with the plan to get us out. She and your grandfather both.”