The Mathematician’s Shiva

by Stuart Rojstaczer

  “Six, eight. Why not twelve, or fourteen, or twenty?”

  “Don’t be mad, Sasha,” my father said.

  “OK, the Karanskys. Who else?”

  “Me,” Yakov said. “Orlansky. Zhelezniak. Ben-Zvi. Ito.”

  I knew all the names. All but Zhelezniak had published papers with my mother. Except for the Karanskys and Zhelezniak, these were people I’d known in some way for decades. Was Zhelezniak there to, as my mother thought, dance on her grave? I knew that wasn’t the case. My view was that he was a fellow great student of the great Kolmogorov. He was a near intellectual peer who had come at considerable expense to pay his respects. “It’s a Jewish event, you know. My mother was a deeply religious person,” I said, as a last line of defense.

  “Sasha, we have a similar ceremony in Buddhism following the death of a loved one,” Ren Ito said. “I would be honored.” Ito. He had lived in our sunroom for six months during a sabbatical in 1957. In World War II, he had been removed from graduate school at Berkeley and sent to a Japanese confinement camp in the Central Valley of California for two years. How could I refuse such a good, gentle man pushing eighty years old?

  “I don’t want a public word out of any of you tomorrow. I swear if anything happens tomorrow, no shiva, no nothing. Understand?”

  “Nothing will happen tomorrow,” Yakov said. “You just have to trust us.”

  “What about Otrnlov?” I asked.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Women

  My zaydeh Aaron used to say, “A mensch tracht un Gott lacht.” You can make all the plans in the world, but God will fuck them up and be happy about it. I had planned to bury my mother quickly and with little in the way of embellishment. I thought, ich hob getracht, that for a week I would grieve in the comfort of my family the way everyone should have a right to grieve. Then I’d fly home for a month, immerse myself in work, the best medicine for mourning anyone could possibly devise, and come back one more time to face the Hollywood (truly) production of a memorial ceremony for my mother at the capitol. But that plan was gone. Now I was on to plan B, not a very good plan at all in my opinion. Plus I had to worry about Otrnlov. One of the Karanskys said he thought Otrnlov had gone to my uncle’s house.

  I called my uncle on his cell. He didn’t answer, nor did he quickly call back as per usual. That was a bad sign. My uncle loved his cell phone. He always possessed the latest model and was one of those men who, in the company of other men, got pleasure from showing off just what his little gadget could do. My uncle was clearly avoiding me.

  Then there was the fact that Anna was angry about the news of the expanded shiva. You never wanted to provoke her. It wasn’t just the emotional toll. She was a thrower. My mother had a lovely, very breakable set of dishware that I had hoped to bring back to Tuscaloosa. Once, while living in Manhattan, Anna threw a frying pan at her second husband’s head. He ducked. The pan continued to sail, crashed through a window, and descended to Amsterdam Avenue, where it burst through the roof of a parked cab. Luckily no one was injured.

  I shouldn’t single Anna out. None of us had anything in the way of equanimity even on good days. But I had to try for her sake. Back at my mother’s house I was beginning to think that it might be best to simply be selfless. As Bruce noted, we were making what he called a strudel, a Hollywood show. If I needed time to reflect, I could hole up in my house in Tuscaloosa for a week after this circus was over.

  Anna was smoking one of Bruce’s French cigarettes in the living room and was pacing the wooden floor in her flats. She was dyeing her hair again, blond this time, and the contrast between the lightness of her hair and the darkness of her skin made her seem otherworldly. She looked like someone capable of making bold and accurate predictions.

  “I’m not going to spend seven days with a bunch of misfits who think they are princes of the planet because they can play with numbers,” she said.

  “They won’t live here. They’ll come in the day. They’ll leave at night. It’ll be OK, I promise.”

  “What can you possibly promise? Be realistic.” Anna gave me a dismissive look while she drew in some smoke.

  “I can’t promise they’ll be human beings during the day, no. But I can promise that we’ll have peace when they are gone.”

  “Avi will be one of them, yes?” The Avi in question was Abraham Ben-Zvi, Anna’s first husband. She had that knowing, big sister tone in her voice. I was starting to feel like I was fifteen again.

  “Yes.”

  “You want me to believe that this was something done at random, cooked up by drawing straws? Those fucking mathematicians. They think they are entitled to lie because what they are working on is so important. Zealots all of them.”

  “I do admit it doesn’t make any sense. Look at those names. They got together and decided. They didn’t draw anything. I’m sure you’re right.”

  “Of course I’m right. And you agreed to this craziness. You told me this would be a ‘dignified event.’ That’s what you said. And I was stupid enough to believe you.”

  “Well, my father opened his big trap.” I gave Anna a pleading look.

  “They probably talked to him before. Probably more than eight wanted to be here. Maybe one hundred. Who knows with those crazy people.” Anna was inclined to believe in conspiracy theories.

  “Ask him. He might tell you the truth.”

  “Your father? Does he tell anyone the truth about such things?”

  “Not usually, no.”

  “And what about you? Do you tell the truth?”

  “In this case, yes.”

  Anna, standing in the center of the living room, looked up at me. “You’re telling the truth. You’re pretty good at lying, but fortunately you have a certain tell. It’s not there.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not going to tell you. I shouldn’t have even mentioned it. That was stupid of me. Your mother told me about it. I didn’t notice it myself. I doubt anyone else would. After all, a mother knows best about a child, yes?”

  “Usually, yes.”

  “But not always in your case, actually. She was a wonderful woman. But she didn’t always do right by you.” I saw a little tenderness in Anna’s eyes just then, but I didn’t like the idea that I was like a mistreated pet.

  “I know she wasn’t perfect.”

  “She made you into a confirmed bachelor with a child you don’t know.”

  “No one could have predicted that Catherine would go to the other side of the earth.” I could have pointed out that no Slav or Eastern European Jew could have predicted this. We expect and demand people to maintain bonds with family. It doesn’t matter whether you love or hate your relatives, even ones you’ve legally divorced. As long as there are children involved, you stick together. Of course, my mother didn’t follow this rule when it came to me, but there were extenuating (read: Soviet) circumstances.

  “That’s the family excuse. I loved your mother as much as anybody. Still do. I used to make that excuse, too. Maybe I love your mother more now that I see her more clearly, mistakes and all.”

  “Maybe you do. I know the mistakes, too. But my mother didn’t make me into anything. I’ve made the choices I’ve wanted to make. Did she have a tell?”

  “Your mother?” She raised an eyebrow. She never liked to divulge any secrets she knew about my mother, even to me.

  “Yeah, when she lied.”

  “I don’t know.” I knew this was a lie. “Who the hell is coming to the door, anyway?” She pointed to the walkway, but I didn’t have quite the view she did.

  “Not Otrnlov, I hope.”

  “No, a group of women,” Anna said, looking through the living room window. “All of them need to learn how to dress.”

  “Mathematicians, no doubt.”

  “No doubt. And if any one of them starts complaining about my cigar
ette, I’m going to kick all those bitches out. I’m not in a mood.”

  Of course they were mathematicians. I knew two of them, Patricia O’Connell and Eva Steinberg, both former students of my mother. Jane Sempralini I knew only from hearing her name now and then. Virginia Potter, who seemed to pay attention to her appearance more than most, was completely new. The rest? There were so few women in mathematics when I was a kid that it’s not surprising that the rest were young, at most thirty years old. They all had been in the lecture hall with me just an hour ago. They, too, had not been pleased by what had transpired.

  “Eight men, and not a single woman,” Steinberg said succinctly, airing her complaint in the living room. She was clearly the leader of this troop. Eva Steinberg was my age. When I was a child in Russia, she was living in a refugee camp in Germany. She took a job at Michigan after she graduated and became the first female professor to obtain tenure in their mathematics department. “Your mother meant so much to us. You have no idea just how much.”

  I knew this was true. My mother broke barriers, although she didn’t break them for all time or for everyone. The second female mathematician elected to the National Academy of Sciences—my mother was the first—was American-born Julia Bowman Robinson. Despite having been a central figure in solving Hilbert’s tenth problem, Robinson did not have a real academic job when she was voted into the academy. At the time of her election, reporters tried to find her at the University of California–Berkeley, which was the institutional affiliation she gave on all her papers. They were told that no one by that name existed on the faculty or staff. Julia Bowman Robinson had a desk in a shared departmental office and taught classes on occasion. Most people knew her not as a mathematician of first rank, but as Professor Raphael Robinson’s devoted, loving wife.

  Anna was standing and smoking, watching these women sitting on the couch and on the wing chairs pleading their case to me not politely but indignantly. “It would be a good idea, actually,” Anna said.

  “What?” I said, turning around and looking at her.

  “Having them here. It would be good.”

  “Why would having six more people in an already crowded house that is supposedly in dignified mourning be a good idea?” My sense that there were six mathematicians in the room disappeared. Anna was sucking all the oxygen out of the room physically and metaphorically.

  “It would be a good idea for me,” Anna said. “Think, Sasha. I have to be here for seven days surrounded by the kind of men you have to force to take a shower more than once a month. It’s oppressive. I have my own grief to deal with, a private grief, and I have to have my ex-husband and his cronies around, too?”

  “How is turning this house into an even tighter sardine can of mathematicians going to help?”

  “Idiot. They’ll be forced to behave better, those boys who think they are men. With just me around, they’ll behave like I’m an intruder.” Anna looked at the other women in the room, and for the first time since I had been back from campus, actually smiled. “How many of you are there?” she asked no one in particular.

  “Well, there are us six, plus we think it would be only fair for two others to attend,” O’Connell said.

  “It seems fair to me as well,” Anna said and nodded approvingly.

  “Twenty-two people in this house for seven days. What’s fair about that?”

  “Plus, the men are all kind of long in the tooth. When is the last time they did anything original?” Eva asked.

  “The Karanskys. They’re thirty-five at most,” I said.

  “They’re on the downward spiral,” Eva said. “I’ve been there. I know. Nothing new will be forthcoming from them, just ideas they thought of that they haven’t finished yet. All ages should be represented.”

  “All I see are two people younger than the Karanskys,” I said.

  “We’ll bring in two more. Your mother was like a god to these young ones.” I knew the type. They had begun to invade Tuscaloosa, these young professors. Male and female, they were all so skinny, fit, and earnest, and so remarkably free of anxiety. When you asked them what they liked to do, they had two answers, their work and running. They ran an ungodly number of miles every week not to avert a health crisis, but simply because they loved to run. Who understood them? Endorphins saturated their blood, mixed with the caffeine from their no-fat lattes. A new generation had arrived, and it quite frankly was superior, if much more boring, than my own.

  I looked at one of the young women suspiciously. Maybe she was twenty-eight. The makeup on her face was so unnecessary. There was not a single mark of age on her dewy skin. I looked closely at her face again for the slightest of signs that she was a Member of the Tribe.

  “Do you even know what a shiva is?” I asked her.

  “It’s a seven-day-long ceremony in honor of the loss of a loved one.”

  “And did you even know my mother, much less love her?”

  “I didn’t know her. But she was an example of what we can all do. Except she did it when it was almost impossible. She was amazing.”

  “She was a remarkable woman, it’s true. But I hate to tell you, she’s not a good role model. What my mother did intellectually, you couldn’t do, never will. You need to find more ordinary role models, and I’m not interested in turning my mother’s shiva into a display of political correctness.”

  “Sasha, forget political correctness,” Anna said. “Think of me and all those men. My ex-husband. It will be unbearable. And as you said, they won’t be here all the time. Just during the day. At night, they’ll stay wherever.”

  “Just these six, then,” I said. “Only because of Anna. No more than that. The boat is now full. And at dinnertime you are all gone.”

  “Most of us are at the Howard Johnson’s,” Steinberg said.

  “Oh, that’s a disgusting hotel.” Anna shook her head.

  “It’s not that bad,” Steinberg said.

  “Professor Steinberg, even when Soviet artists would travel here on tour, we stayed in better places. Seven days in such a pigsty!” Anna nodded sympathetically. “We will find you better. We’ll ask Sasha’s uncle. He is a very resourceful person.”

  “That he is. But he’s not answering phone calls right now.”

  “Oh, not really. He called me before you came. His Russian is not as good as he makes out it seems. He needed me to do some translating. You should probably head over there.”

  CHAPTER 16

  The Prisoner

  I can tell you the exact moment I became interested in meteorology. I was eight years old. It was in June during a year with an early summer when even Wisconsin was hot and muggy. Moisture clung to your skin, and at night thunderstorms lit up the sky.

  We are, as a family, not fond of hot weather, although of course I changed my opinion on this subject as an adult. My mother was convinced that the heat fouled your brain. She used her summers to do things that didn’t require much thought and were strictly for pleasure. For a while, in the good Russian tradition, we had an American version of a dacha, a little cabin on a lake about one hour north of Madison. Every summer we would haul up there for a month or two. My father would abandon his suits and ties, and would even forgo his comb-over as he took dips in the lake or went fishing in our little rowboat. My grandfather would sit at the kitchen table and do his annual dusting and cleaning of our investment portfolio. My mother would fry up the bluegill and perch my father and I caught, although my father was almost always far more successful than I was.

  There is a Russian phrase that my father was fond of that is difficult to give life to in English, bez truda ne vytaschish i rybku iz pruda. It takes work to pull a fish out of the water. I suppose it’s the equivalent of no pain, no gain. But according to my father, this phrase isn’t really talking about pain and it’s not talking about fishing the way Americans think of it. No, it’s about diving deep to find a
carp in one of those murky steppe lakes left by glaciers ten thousand years ago. You have to feel with your hands on the lake bottom without sight of what you are looking for, and hold your breath all the while. Then, somehow, upon feeling that familiar slick skin in the slimy muck, you need to reach for the gill of the fish and literally haul him up with you to the surface. That is indeed work, and I think it has everything to do with scientific discovery. You have to know what you are seeking, are often blind, and have to rely on the feel that comes with experience. Even then, when you finally have something tangible in your grasp, you still have a lot of work and struggle. Immigrants to this country and their children tend to understand this. Americans? Not really. It’s why they don’t often excel in science.

  We were fishing, my father and I, on one of those unbearably hot days when in the afternoon the clouds formed into thunderheads. My father insisted that we continue to do exactly what we had started to do in the morning, weather be damned. As I was casting, I saw a tornado start to form in the distance. At first it was a little gray wisp high in the air, but then it lengthened. Finally its tip hit the water. It was as menacingly elegant as a cobra.

  “Papa, smotri,” I said.

  “Oh my, this I’ve never seen.”

  “What is it?”

  “Tornado, but on the water.”

  The sky was changing color by the instant, turning from ash gray to olive green. I should have been scared, but instead I was entranced. Something almost as powerful as human love filled me. The wind whipped my T-shirt as I watched the funnel in the distance. I barely helped to gather up our fishing gear.

  Right then and there I wanted to know everything about how tornadoes formed. I wanted to know how air and moisture organized in this way. Even today, I think it’s remarkable that it does so. What starts out as a small disturbance cascades under the right and oh so rare conditions. The odds of this cascade of events happening are minuscule, and we know this because little wisps of moisture and air are present with us all the time.