The Mathematician’s Shiva

by Stuart Rojstaczer

  Take it all in. Then imagine all of your awareness disappearing. Your eyes work, yes, but they don’t really see anything. Your brain won’t let you process such information. The smells, they are gone, too. Your ears, they work simply to warn you of danger. Your thoughts, all of them are so uncomplicated and pure. Your mind cares nothing for mathematics. All is about the numbness inside you. This is what I mean by the purity of hunger.

  You are truly in hibernation. Everything has slowed, because any processing, physical or mental, requires energy, and that, if you are truly nutrient-deprived, is precisely what you don’t possess.

  Stop here. Now take your eyes off this page. Forget about my story. Try to imagine this purity of absence. Do it. Try to do this for five minutes.

  Now you’re back. Maybe you can understand now, although I sincerely doubt it. But if you have managed to feel just a sliver of pure hunger, it’s horrible, isn’t it? Also, it’s not like giving birth, where the mind can purposely forget all the pain so that you will do it again. It’s not like that at all. Pure hunger is never forgotten. The memory of that feeling is placed in a part of your brain that allows for perfect permanent storage and almost instant recall. You never want to experience such a sense of deprivation again.

  It can get worse than this, the retardation of everything, the numbing of your fingertips to go with the dull feeling in your belly. There is hunger beyond what I’ve described. I’ve never felt it, but I know people who survived the war under even worse conditions than my father and I did. They have told me what happens next. Even in the presence of food, the brain doesn’t respond. Everything completely shuts down and your mind simply waits—without even the energy left for dread—for the time when everything expires.

  As I’ve said, my body never shut down quite completely like this. We would have something to eat every day, just never enough. When I saw any food, a few crumbs of stale bread, some heated water containing the thinnest hint of something, even when that water was heated only with bones, my mind would spring up again. My purpose day-to-day was to eat and to have the sensory ability to find something that could potentially be edible.

  When did this happen? We were near the Barents Sea during the war, north of the Arctic Circle. My father worked in the mines every day. There were clearings in the woods where the Soviets had built quarters for the miners and their families. There were no fences to keep us in. Where would we have gone?

  In every clearing there were about six low-lying structures, long sheds. They possessed no windows. These sheds, covered in tar paper, had been broken up into four single-roomed living quarters, each with a wood-burning stove. The beds were made of louse-covered cloths filled with straw on wooden frames. The floor consisted of rough planks of wood. To keep the lice down—but certainly not to eliminate them—we’d put each leg of our beds into a cup and then fill that cup with kerosene. It was a trick that someone taught us early on. Before then, I can’t begin to describe the agony of the itching and bites.

  At first, we suffered tolerable deprivation mixed with an almost unbearable loss of dignity. It would get worse, although we couldn’t imagine how. I had grown up so fast in just two months, had lost the demanding princess inside me. Unlike my mother, I completely stopped crying. It’s not that I didn’t want to do so. I just couldn’t. The feeling of hurt would come to my eyes, I could definitely sense it, but nothing would happen. I had been transformed into a hardened adult, someone fully accepting of tragedy and disappointment. I understood the limitations present in the world. I could cope with anything, or so I thought.

  One can, I suppose, invent silver linings just because they provide some sort of meaning to tragedy and make the horrible palatable. But I don’t think I’m doing this when I say that without those days above the Arctic Circle I wouldn’t have accomplished much. I know exactly what direction my life would have taken without the war. I would have remained a spoiled child, growing up in my provincial Polish town with my little dog walking beside me on my visits to the town square.

  The ties to my Christian friends would have been magically cut in my early teens, just like they had been cut with my mother and her friends at that age, and I would have accepted this change as inevitable and somehow natural. I would have lived my comfortable Jewish life with the overarching sense that it was my destiny.

  The world of Jewish privilege in my hometown was available, of course, only to a few. There were twenty thousand Jews in my sthtetl, and what did I know of them? Our own house, lovely, one of the most beautiful in town, was made of stone. A wall of that same stone, perhaps three meters high, surrounded our rear yard. This was my world. I don’t see how or why I would have left it even in marriage and beyond. I would have married into a similar family, taken care of a similar lovely house, brought up my own children, and continued to live a life of luxury, free from anything approaching intellectual thought.

  Remember, my first mathematical stirrings did not take place until relatively late. I was already nine years old, almost ancient by standard measures. My dear mentor Kolmogorov was four when he began to examine the rudiments of number theory, or so he told me. Other mathematicians will tell you similar stories. But me? I needed the deprivation of war to let my mind be idle enough to discover the world of mathematics on my own.

  How would this have happened in dear, provincial Vladimir-Volynski, with my days filled with things I thought were so important, like whether Katya and Brecca (Where are they now, I wonder?) would get permission to travel with my mother and me to Lvov to buy some Italian shoes for the school year. I would think of the colors I would try on, the wonderful softness of the leather. How could mathematics have entered a mind filled with such banal detail?

  I needed a war to make me into a mathematician. I needed deprivation to make me appreciate every little gift, every tiny increment—like a crumb of food, yes—of understanding while solving a problem. I don’t believe a spoiled child, even one encouraged to pursue the intellectual world, can ever be anything more than a second-rate mathematician. This is what war gave me, a life of the mind that would sustain me almost always.

  There we were, in a place far, far from anything. As I said, at first the deprivation was tolerable. We had food, though barely enough to get by. We had wood for our stove. I would attend school, and this is where my talent was discovered. My teacher somehow knew I possessed this ability in mathematics. I don’t know how. She was from Ukraine. I remember her well, still, how she tied her hair in a braided bun. I had never seen this before. It was a style from the eastern part of her own country. For many years, I have worn my hair in that style in her honor.

  I did mathematics while the other children played. Almost all of the children in our part of the camp were Jewish like me, yes, but most didn’t know Polish aside from a few words. They were barely competent with Russian, struggling in school just to comprehend what our teacher said. They spoke Yiddish, a language that I barely knew, and with an accent not from my region, not with closed vowels, but something broader. Initially, I couldn’t understand them, and first impressions leave an indelible mark. They would taunt me: “Little Christian Rachela with the blond hair.” “Your name is Jewish, but you can’t be.” “Your father is Jewish but not your mother.” “Stuck with the Jews you are, now you know what it’s like.”

  Even had I wanted to, the other children wouldn’t let me play with them most days. But I was already occupied with something serious. I began to work on more topology problems. This was my entry into the world of mathematics, spatial relationships in the real world. I understand why my son studies what he does. It comes from me. Fortunately and unfortunately, he never had to endure hunger, never had to live without.

  My teacher told the authorities about my gift. Somehow she knew I was not simply talented, but a prodigy. The food came, little scraps of horrible meat, but still I was so proud of what I managed to provide my family. Mrs. Sharekhova, you are
long gone from this world, I know. But you were a splendid, observant teacher. What brought you to that forsaken edge of the earth?

  My mother would die that spring after a long, hard winter. So did almost everyone, it seemed. The rations became smaller and smaller. The wood allotments shrank as well. We were cold. We were starving, all of us. That’s when cholera came. My mathematics stopped, the only time in sixty years that this has happened. When hunger and death come there isn’t room for anything else.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Ballerina

  My mother hated Russia, more specifically the USSR. Despite the fact that the Soviet state identified her gift for mathematics and provided her with a world-class education under the tutelage of one of the best minds of the twentieth century, mere mention of the Soviet Union would cause bile to rise in my mother. It was all about her own mother, who died of cholera near the Barents Sea. Such deaths weren’t unusual, certainly. Stalin was responsible for the death of perhaps as many as forty million.

  That my grandmother, whom I, of course, never met, was one of many who died because of Stalin’s cruelty did not diminish its impact on my mother. I understand this a bit. It has been eleven years since my mother’s death, and while I had the gift of being with her well into my adulthood, I still feel the loss of her presence. Had I, like her, been ten years old, sent to a barren, frigid landscape, and watched my mother die because of the absence of even rudimentary sanitation—something that should be a given in any truly civilized country, war or not—I would no doubt be angry for life.

  My mother harbored this hatred of the Soviet Union from her childhood onward and defected to the West as soon as she possibly could. Her husband and her toddler son, me of course, were in Moscow at the time. That’s why the Soviets had no fear about her going to Berlin to give a talk in 1951. Yes, my mother left both my father and me behind when she defected. It seems to be a family tradition, this leaving the son behind. Perhaps this is why my uncle and I are so close.

  Years later she tried to explain her defection to me. It wasn’t just the oppressive nature of communism. She had no intellectual future in Russia. “Women in American universities complain about being treated like dirt today,” she said. “They have no idea what it was like for me back then, even after I married. In the West, as bad as it was for women, it was heaven in comparison. Sure American men thought they could intimidate me. But I’d lived through war. I had starved. American male mathematicians back then, and even now, the obnoxious ones, you can still see their mothers’ milk on their lips. What can they possibly do to scare me? Little crying babies they are. British mathematicians, too.”

  I was in good hands, she said, and she was convinced that she would never get my father to defect willingly. She had to force the issue by going ahead of him, and she was confident he would follow. “Your father is a resourceful man when he needs to be. I knew he would find a way. But those two years being away from you were harder than anything, absolutely anything else, I have lived through.”

  I could have challenged this assertion of my mother, I suppose. Really now. Leaving me was more difficult than starving along the Barents Sea? But I didn’t have a child then. I didn’t know, even vaguely, the difference between physical deprivation and the emotional loss of one’s child, even when you know that child is healthy and well.

  I don’t remember much of the years without my mother. The facts consist mostly of what others have told me. I don’t remember missing my mother, although I do remember my father telling me that one day soon we’d all be together again. Here are the facts, a bit inadequate and random. My father lost his position at Moscow State University because of my mother’s defection. Kolmogorov couldn’t help my father, except perhaps to save him from being arrested and imprisoned. Daily, the NKVD watched us.

  How we lived those two years without any real income is testimony to my father’s strength of will and cunning. But it is more than this. How he implemented his plan to get us out of the Soviet Union required a singleness of purpose few possess. For those two years, our little apartment became an English-only zone. I am perhaps one of a handful of Russian citizens, well, former Soviet citizens to be precise, whose true first language was English. This was part of his plan, for me to speak as if I were an American, without even a trace of an accent. Where did he get the books and tapes for this major effort at subterfuge? I don’t know to this day.

  My father insists that at the age of three I spoke English with the casual, lazy tongue of an American sitcom child actor, but I find this hard to believe. At any rate, all those years in the little Moscow of the United States—my parents’ Madison bungalow, with its frequent Russian visitors receiving my mother’s kindness—partly reversed my father’s hard work. Today most everyone knows I’m an immigrant from the second I open my mouth.

  I will explain later exactly how my father and I defected. Again, it’s nothing I remember. But I am told that I was ecstatic to come to a land where everyone spoke “my language.” I was happy, of course, to see my mother. What child wouldn’t be?

  As I write this, I am a little past sixty years of age, and the fact is that my happiness over my arrival in this country has never left. I consider myself a very fortunate man. Where would I be in Russia today? Nowhere enviable, no doubt. But here I have much for which to be thankful. Like my mother, I possess an intense patriotic fervor. Sometimes I cry at baseball games when I sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” along with everyone else. My hyperpatriotism is one of the few things I share with most of my old Southern neighbors.

  But my mother’s patriotism, wed to her extreme antipathy toward the Soviet Union, possessed her to do things well beyond crying while singing about our great country. She wanted to share her patriotism for the wonderful USA with more Russians, as many as she could convince to abandon their Soviet home. This meant that just about every Russian citizen who managed to reach our modest city during the Cold War would encounter my mother and her larger-than-life presence. They would receive a speech from her that changed frequently in its particulars but always contained the same message: defect and stay in the paradise of America.

  Whenever there was a Russian cultural event, we would be there. A ballet. A circus. A concert. A poetry reading. Russian ice skaters in tacky costumes dancing to Frank Sinatra. Some of these performances, even the highest of the high, on the part of Russian artists were painfully comical. For example, the Moscow State Symphony came to Madison when I was eight or so and played in the university stock pavilion, the only place large enough to house the thousands of music lovers excited about the prospect of hearing a world-class orchestra. The venue, of course, smelled like the barn it was and, worse yet, in the middle of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, with the strings bowing vigorously and the cymbals crashing, a nearby train with perhaps one-hundred-plus cars’ worth of coal and whatnot whistled its presence. The conductor, infuriated by the disturbance, stopped the orchestra in mid-measure, and waited a full five minutes for the train to pass. The orchestra never returned to our humble city.

  We would drive to Chicago—my father gleefully speeding down US 20, then years later even more happily driving on the brand-new racetrack called I-90—to see Russian performers. These trips had only a little to do with cultural enrichment. My mother was on a political mission. We would always find a way to talk to the performers.

  My mother’s Russian was impeccable, the Russian of the elite, educated class. Russia, a country that for decades was supposedly about classlessness, is perhaps the most class-aware country I know. Accents, diction, and grammar provide a sharp dividing line and always have. Backstage at intermission or after the show, the sincerity and expert basis of my mother’s pronouncements to these performers was accepted without question. She would talk to the artists as my father and I idly stood by. The appreciation in the performers’ eyes, hearing my mother heap praise, was often palpable. But it was never long lasting. In the uneve
n light that seems to exist backstage in all concert halls, the inevitable would happen. My mother would pause from her stream of compliments, breathe in the stale indoor air, and then change her tone.

  “You poor things. You are like circus animals, in a way. Forced to travel and parade your beauty and talent only to be put back in a cage after the show. I know. I was like you. But now, here, I am free. My name is Rachela Karnokovitch. I was a student of the great Kolmogorov in Moscow. But here I am free to do whatever I wish. I can accomplish so much more than I ever could in Russia. And you can, too. . . .”

  Usually, well before she reached this part of her standard speech, the blue suits with their pale skin, bad breath, and yellowed teeth would come forth and gently try to move my mother along. Also usually, well before this portion of her speech, the appreciative glow on the artists’ faces would change to panic at the thought of what punishments might await them as a result of this random, contaminating encounter with my mother. Sometimes the panic would escalate into hysterical shouts of disavowal in Russian. “I don’t know this person! I’ve never met her! She came from I-don’t-know-where!”

  My mother, my father, and I would walk away. My mother would forcibly remove the hand of the KGB man against her elbow. “I don’t need your help, you bastard,” she would growl. Then the litany would fly from her lips. “You dogs! In Russia, I had to be polite to you, smile at you. But here it’s different. Here, you have to be pleasant to me. How many have you murdered, you bastards? How many have you imprisoned? Here on Earth you are almighty. But in the world to come you will burn forever!”