The Mathematician’s Shiva (5 page)

Seven days in a house full of mathematicians who would pry up floorboards looking for hidden notes. Seven days with a father who had a difficult time forgiving me for abandoning what he worked so hard to train me to do. I wished out of both selfishness, so I could have avoided these days, and of course out of love, that my mother had proven to be immortal.

M
y mother’s mentor, the great Kolmogorov, died in Moscow in 1987. Of course, the Russians, out of spite, denied my mother’s request to attend the funeral. Whenever her name was mentioned in official Russian publications prior to 1989, they either pretended her career as a mathematician abruptly ended for no apparent reason in 1951 or simply made note of her first position after defecting, a lectureship at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. To someone in the West, this mention of her work in Germany would not be understood as anything out of the ordinary. But for a Russian it was an obvious and telltale slur. My mother was the lowest of the low, someone who abandoned communism and allied herself with Russia’s truly worst and most vile enemy, the German Republic.

The rejection of my mother’s request actually was, in hindsight, of no consequence. It was foggy in Moscow around the time of Kolmogorov’s funeral, so foggy that planes could not land. My mother would probably have missed the event even if she had tried to attend. But she heard, of course, what had transpired. People came when they could by train, and the initial crowd, already large, eventually became an unmanageable sea of mathematicians, Soviet apparatchiks, and admirers not simply of the mathematical mind of Kolmogorov, but of his amazing political skill. How on earth did he, of all people, manage to avoid being exiled or worse during the bleak days of the 1950s, when anyone with any intellect was automatically targeted as an Enemy of the People?

Even Premier Gorbachev, fancying himself a bit of an intellectual, attended and spoke at this event. One could say without much distortion and hyperbole that Kolmogorov represented the best of what the USSR could offer both as an intellectual and as a citizen who profoundly shaped Russian education. A bastard son of humble beginnings who was nurtured with care by the Soviet system and gave so much back in return out of gratitude, it was perhaps to be expected that since his youth coincided with the rise of communism, his death would essentially be aligned with its collapse.

America obviously is not Russia. Mathematics does not hold any magnetic appeal. No, here it is strictly billionaires, football players, and movie stars who are of interest to the public. Certainly President Clinton, who had in 1993 awarded my mother a National Medal of Science for her achievements, was not going to attend her funeral in a Midwestern state where he knew his token presence would give Democrats no political advantage. He had other things on his mind, no doubt.

Besides, according to my mother, they had had an odd exchange at the medal ceremony. She was waiting in line in the Rose Room of the White House next to someone who had discovered, among other things, a new comet. Clinton chatted amiably with “Mr. Comet Man,” giving him a big frat-brother pat on the back as he complimented him on his “eagle eye.” He then moved to my mother, and struggled to find an entryway into conversation. “You know, Doctor K.,” he said, giving an aw-shucks grin, “I hear you’re just great with numbers.” Clinton began to tell my mother of a recurring dream. He is in an elevator of an impossibly tall building. He keeps rising higher and higher alone in this elevator, the numbers signifying what floor he is on getting bigger and bigger. “What do you think it means, Doctor K.?”

“Well, I’m a mathematician, not a psychoanalyst,” my mother said. “But it would seem that your subconscious is telling you that you are in over your head in your present job.”

Clinton looked at my mother quizzically, and then grimaced, his jawbone clearly visible. The silence was palpable until Mrs. Clinton, standing behind him, broke into her signature, wineglass-breaking laughter. “Oh, it’s a joke!” President Clinton smiled, hearing his wife’s appreciation of my mother’s dry humor. “You had me there, Doctor K.!” President Clinton placed his hand on my mother’s shoulder briefly and then walked on. Mrs. Clinton gave a nod and a conspiratorial grin that my mother returned. My mother interpreted this brief wordless exchange as an indication that Hillary well understood that her husband, like most men lost in their egos and need for constant praise, was incapable of anything but obvious thought.

The
New York Times
, of course, had an obituary of my mother with a photograph taken by a White House photographer from that 1993 event. My mother never, ever smiled in a photograph. I have hundreds of pictures of her, and in almost every one there is that same look of scrutiny on her face. It’s as if she is challenging the photographer to go ahead and try to take a decent picture of her. The
Times
called her, “The greatest female mathematician of her generation, and perhaps the greatest of any generation.” My father, upon reading these words, looked hurt and turned indignant. “What is this qualification ‘female’? What do these idiots know of mathematics? There will not be another like her for two hundred years, maybe longer.”

But he had a right to be pissy. We were at my mother’s home—a place from which he had been banished for many years, until my mother became sick—and the onslaught of phone calls, e-mails, and knocks on the door was already overwhelming. My cell phone mailbox had become completely filled in a matter of hours, mostly with condolences and requests for funeral information from Slavic-accented mathematicians.

“I want a private service,” I said to my father. “Just us. The family.”

“Good luck with that,” my father said. “You know better than to ask for such a thing.”

“You want to go with us to the funeral home and to find a plot?”

“No. I don’t care for cemeteries. That is something Shlomo is best at doing, anyway.”

“I’m going to buy two plots, you know. Together. You and Mother.”

“Yes, I understand. Rachela already told me. You can put me in a Jewish cemetery, I suppose. I won’t be able to object when the time comes, anyway.”

“I’ll need your signature attesting to your Jewish faith.”

“You aren’t telling me anything I didn’t already figure out. It’s a good thing I’m an atheist. You, however, have to play whack-a-mole with your sins.” He gave me an ironic grin. Did I view the prospect of burying my father, who wasn’t even circumcised, in a Jewish cemetery a sin? The answer is definitely not. He belonged next to my mother despite their many years apart. I would pay some extra money to the director of the funeral home so he would allow for this travesty. Yes, I knew I would be doing this not just for my mother. Mostly I was being selfish. I wanted to visit one place and one place only when, in the future, I would come back. Although I had no doubt that death was, aside from the recycling of carbon, a final act, I still needed to remember who these two people were.

Besides, it’s not a Russian thing to follow rules, unless of course not following them will likely mean prison or worse. Many rules are in fact inherently stupid. Look at this rule about burial. You are required to be of the faith to be buried in a Jewish cemetery. The logic of such a rule, perhaps obvious to you, seems nonexistent to me. My father, like my mother, would end up a pile of bones soon enough. Did it really matter whether the penis once attached to my father’s bones had a foreskin? After a few years underground, what evidence would there be of his Jewishness or lack thereof?

But my father was right. I do play whack-a-mole with my sins. I try to be a good person for, as the tacky Christmas song goes, goodness sake. Unfortunately, I don’t possess the strength of will to avoid even the most common and obvious of pitfalls. So I do pray. I am, in fact, a praying atheist, and I’m sure there are many like me, although it’s not a population that is measured in any census of which I am aware. What does prayer provide me, the most ordinary of sinners? A sense that my frailty is communal, a sense that I shouldn’t be singled out for my human failures, or my attempts, however pathetic, to rid myself of them.

I prayed in Tuscaloosa regularly, most Friday nights at a tiny synagogue in a building that once housed a Jewish dry goods store. I certainly know how to pray according to the rules. In my teens, my mother sent me off to a Jewish high school in Chicago for a proper education. The idea was that rigor of any stripe would be lacking in the public high schools of Madison. The first time I went to the Tuscaloosa synagogue, the rabbi was out of town, and the synagogue president was on the
bima
[podium] valiantly trying to lead the services in a halting Hebrew with a crib sheet. I looked up from the second row and began to play the role of prompter, mouthing the syllables so she could see. After that incident I was more or less thrust into the role of assistant rabbi, which meant from then on I sometimes led services in the rabbi’s absence.

Word of my semi-prowess in prayer and in Hebrew seemed to spread magically outside the barely existent Jewish community of Tuscaloosa into the general populace. Three blue-haired, Bible-toting ladies started to come by my house occasionally on Sundays.

With a mixture of the earnestness of faith and the bossiness of a healthy old age, they would show me passages that interested them in a dark brown, leather-bound King James Old Testament. They wanted to know, “What’s it say in the original?” I would pull out my Five Books of Moses and translate the contents directly from the Hebrew for comparison. I never tried to tell them that the Hebrew from which I was reading was essentially a translation as well. I admired them for their faith and desire, however misguided, to get to know something akin to the true story.

I met my uncle at the synagogue, where we prayed, as is customary for those in mourning. I hadn’t been there in a long time, and the old guys—some of the same old guys who were already stooped over and tiny when I was a kid—gave me a nod of awareness before we began. Then, after, they all shook my hand and told me what a wonderful woman my mother had been.

My uncle and I drove to the cemetery, the hot air in his Lincoln Town Car blasting and keeping us remarkably warm despite the cold outside. “She wanted a plain pine box, you know,” I said. “Just some rope around it. That’s it.”

“People will think we’re being cheap. We need to do something a little better,” my uncle said.

“OK, whatever.”

“The governor call you?”

“The governor? Maybe. There were a lot of messages. I couldn’t possibly listen to all of them.”

“Dombrowski himself was on the phone. Not an aide. He was asking about the funeral.” My uncle tapped his wedding ring against the steering wheel.

“You know him?”

“I give him money, but no, I don’t really know him. I just shake his hand at dinners. He wants to give a speech.”

“My mother know him?”

“Definitely not.”

“He wants to turn my mother’s funeral into a political event?” I turned to face my uncle, who continued to look straight ahead.

“Yes, something about Badger Ingenuity.” There it was, that ungainly phrase, Badger Ingenuity. How the governor loved to use it when extolling the virtues of my home state. Manufacturing—upon which Wisconsin employment was more dependent than any other state in the Union—was plummeting due to the nation’s push to have all of our jobs moved to China in the name of globalization, aka “let’s accelerate corporate profits at the expense of the American worker.” Governor Dombrowski, who claimed to be a distant relative of Copernicus, was forever trying to promote high-tech in Wisconsin.

While no national politician would be concerned with the death of a great mathematical mind, a Wisconsin politician was perhaps another matter. Home to a mere five million people, the state is best known for cheese, beer, and consuming an ungodly amount of alcohol per capita, in particular 25 percent of the nation’s brandy. And what of Wisconsin’s famous sons and daughters? Liberace. Hildegaard. Spencer Tracy. James Lovell. The Violent Femmes. The long-standing replacement guitarist for the rock band Genesis, I’ve forgotten his name. Gene Wilder. A book of famous Wisconsinites would be laughably thin, and most of those who might be included were, in truth, cultural obscurities.

Then there are the intellectual achievements of those from the Badger State. How many gleaming medals of anything have University of Wisconsin professors been awarded by the White House? One, to my mother. How many Nobel prizes? One, to Howard Terman, who died in the 1970s. Wisconsin did not apparently have much of a history of Badger Ingenuity.

“The man is an idiot,” I said.

“Yes, but he is also the governor.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him we would be honored to attend a separate memorial service at the capitol if he would like to arrange it.”

“And I suppose you want me to fly in for such an event, yes?”

“Of course. It’s the governor. They have to plan this and that. Maybe in a month they will hold it.”

“And why do you want this to happen?”

“Now is not the time to discuss such things.” I suppose I should have been angry with my uncle for trying to turn my mother’s death into an opportunity for business. But this was who he was. Despite, and maybe because of, growing up in a communist country, my uncle was inherently entrepreneurial. At least he was being honest with me. For now.

“It’s the third funeral for our family in this country,” my uncle said as we got out of the car. He reached down and picked up two stones. We walked to his first wife’s grave, the red granite carved on the right-hand side, the empty shiny surface on the left. “I’ll end up here, too, eh?” my uncle said. “I wanted to buy a plot for your mother when I bought these two. Right here.” He pointed to a plot on the right, filled, next to his first wife. His father’s tombstone was on the left. “But she said no. Now we’ll have to be buried apart.”

The air was cold against my cheeks. I could feel the hardness of the frozen ground through the soles of my shoes. After a century of use, the cemetery was almost completely full. In another few years, a new cemetery would open miles away from this one. My uncle placed jagged stones on his father’s and wife’s graves and recited a prayer. “Your mother was a good sister-in-law to her.”

“She reminded Mom of her past, I think.”