The Mathematician’s Shiva

by Stuart Rojstaczer

  “But what about the proof, Viktor?” Yakov asked.

  “There is no proof hidden anywhere, you idiots,” my father said. Disappointment for Slavs is always more poetic and profound, as well as more frequent, than it is for Americans. The collective sigh of the eleven mathematicians in the house, for many of whom English was a second, third, or fourth language, was palpable.

  • • •

  The adrenaline surge caused by our mad search, so surprisingly successful for lucre but so devastatingly unsuccessful in terms of intellectual treasure, had left all of us by the time Zhelezniak, Potter, Bruce, and Ari—our shiva’s lovebirds—returned. Bruce, upon hearing the news, asked to see the coins. I placed them on the kitchen table. A crowd gathered, the way it always does when something that glitters is placed in view. Bruce was sincerely impressed by the bounty.

  “That’s easily thirty K right there,” he said. “Way to go, Aunt Rachela.”

  “I thought you weren’t good at math,” I said.

  “That’s not math. That’s arithmetic. I could always do arithmetic,” Bruce said.

  “He does have a good head for numbers,” Uncle Shlomo said. “He got it from me.”

  “What are you going to do with it?” Bruce asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll start a ranch.”

  Zhelezniak looked at the coins in the green metal box, picked one up, and rubbed it between his fingers, a rueful expression on his face. “Eighteen ninety-seven. One hundred years ago. The problems were easier to solve then.”

  “Only in hindsight,” one of the triplets said. “Important problems are always difficult to solve.”

  “Perhaps.”

  My granddaughter, Amy, was looking up at Pascha. “Can I take her out, Grandpa?”

  “There are too many people around for that, Amy,” I said. “Maybe later, when things quiet down.”

  “She can handle Pascha?” Bruce asked.

  “Apparently yes,” I said.

  “Amy likes Russian food, too,” Yakov noted. “It’s almost like a reincarnation.”

  “She does have a gift for math, it’s true,” my father said, and gave her an affectionate pat on the head.

  “An ayzene kepl,” my uncle said. “I don’t feel so bad anymore. I thought this family was dead. Now look. It keeps going.” He gave my daughter a patriarchal gaze that I didn’t even know he possessed. “Both of you need to have children,” he said. “She in twenty years. You a couple more in the next ten wouldn’t be bad either.”

  “I need to find a good man first,” Andrea said.

  “It’s true,” said Anna. “So many men. But most aren’t worth even a penny.”

  “I’m a good man,” Shlomo said. “There are others, too. Don’t be so pessimistic.”

  Zhelezniak looked down at Amy, who was ignoring the conversation and watching Pascha. “She’s been studying?”

  “Yes, with Professor Shackleworth,” Andrea said.

  “At Berkeley?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s a good man. He wouldn’t waste time on someone without talent. She must have a gift.”

  “He’s why we’re here now. He had a hunch we were related to Professor Karnokovitch.”

  “I’d like to show her some mathematics from her great-grandmother. Would you mind?”

  “Zhelezniak, she’s six years old,” I said. “My mother was eleven when she drew those pictures.”

  “A gift is a gift, Sasha.”

  “You want to show her Rachela’s papers, do you, Vladimir?” my father asked with his thin-lipped smile.

  “Of course. What would be the harm?”

  “What’s next? You going to show the papers to Pascha, too?” I asked.

  “Actually, we already sort of did this,” Peter Orlansky said. He looked up at the cage at Pascha and continued, “Chcemy zbadac skalowanie funkcji rózniczkowalnej w sposób ciagły.”

  “Nastepujacy postulat,” Pascha squawked.

  “Pascha likes you. I’ve never seen her so perky with a man,” I said to Peter. “I didn’t know you knew Polish.”

  “My parents. It was their secret language—the one they used when they didn’t want me to understand what they were saying—until I picked it up.”

  “What did they go to after that?”

  “They switched to Russian. But I picked that up as well.”

  “What did you say to Pascha?” Amy asked Peter.

  “I asked her about the existence of continuously differentiable functions,” Peter said.

  “And what did she say back?”

  “Gibberish, really.”

  “Gibberish? About what?”

  “Something about the existence of a postulate. Do you know what a postulate is?”

  “Yes, a little.”

  “Do you know what a continuously differentiable function is?”

  “No. But it makes sense. If you can differentiate a function, you should be able to differentiate it everywhere, I think.”

  “Not always, Amy. But lots of times you can,” Peter said.

  “When can’t you?” Amy asked. Now all eyes were on my little granddaughter, whose own eyes were no longer on Pascha but directed toward the tall Princeton professor who had wished so ardently for so many years that my mother would come to Princeton and stay, whose broad shoulders and athletic build belied his lack of coordination, whose wife dressed him every morning before he went to campus, whose dress was absent of any color coordination given that he was on his own in Madison, and who was categorically incapable of looking anyone in the eye, even the great-granddaughter of his best collaborator.

  “Show her the papers, Peter,” Vladimir said, pulling out the thin sheets from his coat pocket.

  “If he shows them to her, Vladimir, she gets to keep them,” my father said.

  “What?” Vladimir turned around.

  “This is the work of her great-grandmother and my wife. It’s only fitting that they be hers to keep.”

  “I need to copy them first.”

  “No. You’ve stared at them for a dozen years already. They haven’t done you any good. If Amy looks at them, she keeps them. Have a seat, Amy. Professor Orlansky wants to show you something.”

  “Is it OK, Andrea?” I asked.

  “I don’t see why not.”

  Amy sat down, and the gentle giant, Peter Orlansky, sat next to her. He placed the two sheets on the kitchen table. “Your great-grandmother was just a little older than you when she made these drawings, Amy,” my father said.

  “She was good at drawing,” Amy said, examining the papers.

  “It’s of the Barents Sea, an ocean a long ways away,” my father said.

  “Did she swim in the sea?”

  “I don’t think so. The water is very cold.”

  “And she drew birds that were there, too?” Amy asked.

  “Mosquitoes. There were lots of mosquitoes where she was,” I said.

  “That’s right, Amy,” my father said, and shot me a look.

  “That’s funny that she drew mosquitoes.” Amy gave a giggle. “They must have been really big.”

  “She was trying to understand them, Amy,” Peter said. “And the waves in the sea too, I think. How they moved. She thought there was some connection between them. That the equations that described the movement of both were more closely related than any of us think they are.”

  “There are a lot of equations here. She wrote so small,” Amy said, touching the greasy surface of each paper.

  “Paper was very hard to come by back then,” my father said.

  “She was trying to show that the equations that described the movement of both the waves and the mosquitoes were continuously differentiable, that they were related,” Peter said. “If she could show one was continuously differentiab
le, then by extension, the other must also be so.”

  “It makes sense,” Amy said.

  “It does,” Peter said. “But we don’t understand the relationship between the two. That’s the problem. Your great-grandmother didn’t tell us how the two equations were so close. They look too different for any of us to make any headway.”

  “The mosquitoes aren’t as big as the waves, but she drew them like they were,” Amy said.

  “Exactly,” Peter said. “And if you looked at the waves real close, if you really got up to them, you’d see that there were smaller and smaller waves inside the big ones.”

  “Waves as small as mosquitoes, even?” Amy asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Now that’s really funny,” Amy said.

  “We want you to look at what your grandmother wrote here,” Zhelezniak said. “She was a little girl just like you. She was trying to understand this problem.”

  “Not all the writing is the same. The stuff on top is different,” Amy said.

  “That’s right, Amy,” I said. “She had a teacher back then, just like you have Professor Shackleworth. He wrote down the beginning of the problem. And then she started to finish it.”

  “It looks really hard, what she was doing.”

  “It was very hard,” Peter said in that quiet monotone of his that made some people, those not in the know, think he was mentally retarded when he was a teen.

  “Look at it very carefully,” Zhelezniak said. “Start with this line first.” Zhelezniak took his slender index finger to a point below the pictures of mosquitoes hovering in space.

  “There are a lot of words. What language is it?”

  “Some Russian. Some Polish, just like Pascha speaks,” I said.

  “I want to learn Polish, Grandpa. I want to speak to Pascha.”

  “And then you could understand what your great-grandmother wrote when she was a child, too,” I said.

  “Yeah, I’d like to understand.”

  “This is worthless,” Zhelezniak said in Russian.

  “You were never going to solve this problem, anyway. You’re too old. We’re all too old,” my father said.

  “What did you say, Great-grandpa?” Amy asked my father.

  “I said that you can keep Great-grandma Rachela’s drawings. She would have wanted you to have them, I know.”

  “Can I go to the ocean where she was one day? I’d like to see where she drew this. I’d like to see the big mosquitoes.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Mama’s Boy

  DAY 5

  Four days of relying on someone else’s cooking was getting on my nerves. I understood this part of the logic of shiva. You are grieving. You are lost in thinking about your loss. Cooking is work. Someone else should do it. But cooking is also about memory, especially when it comes to the loss of mothers, at least for mothers who cook. I wouldn’t say that my mother had a talent for cooking, but she did have an understanding of the basic dos and don’ts. My memories of her at breakfast or at dinner were almost always positive. Why would I not want to think about those good days while I mourned?

  On winter nights, when I was a kid, the food would come to the table like a gift. Steam rose from the main dish. Dinner would take place in the early evening just after sunset. Questions would be asked about school. My mother liked to keep tabs on me. My father liked to hear about my successes. Often there would be visitors. The émigrés would speak in Russian. The mathematicians would speak in their own symbolic language. Once I turned eight years old, the expectation was that I would not shy away from participating in the interplay. I knew Russian. I knew enough mathematics to be conversant. I was a Karnokovitch. I was supposed to be smart and was not supposed to be shy about my intelligence, either.

  To Americans, the outward display of intelligence is considered unseemly. The Donald Trumps of the world can boast about their penthouses and Ferraris, their women can wear baubles the size of Nebraska, and no one says boo. If you have money, you’re almost always expected to flaunt it. But intellect? This is something else entirely. Women, especially, are supposed to play dumb. One of the richest men in America has said publicly that if your SAT score is too high, find a way to sell 200 points. Supposedly you don’t need them.

  This inability of Americans to value intellect is, to me, maddening. If someone possesses physical beauty, they will not be cloistered or hidden in dark shadows. No, they are expected to be the source of pleasing scenery to others. We are not frightened in this country by beauty. We celebrate it, as we should. But what about beautiful brains, the kind that can create amazing worlds out of nothing but thoughts, that can find a way to intricately bond elements of our lives and our ideas that conventional wisdom tells us are inert? Why should anyone hide this intellect ever? No. Fuck boring financiers like Warren Buffett. If you have a high score on your SAT, don’t sell a single point. In fact, find a way to get smart enough to achieve a perfect score. There is no such thing as unnecessary beauty, whether it be physical or intellectual.

  During these dinners, as in every aspect of her life, my mother was incapable of hiding just how smart she was. Her intelligence was perhaps the first thing after her long blond braids that anyone noticed. If someone was scared off, so be it. But for those who stuck around there was another side she often showed, a nurturing aspect that for some was life-changing, as it was for Anna.

  She touched people, ordinary people in the community, especially women in her synagogue. When I visited Madison, women I didn’t know would sometimes, if they learned that I was Rachela’s son, erupt in unsolicited praise. Jenny Rivkin was one of those women my mother influenced. I could tell from her earnestness when she walked into the house to deliver her carefully cooked meals. She’d walk in and quickly, too quickly for Yakov, be gone, her task done.

  On the fifth night of shiva, I ignored the piles of casseroles, salads, cookies, and cakes and pulled out some pots and pans to make a meal, something simple but resonant of the family dinners of our past. Each utensil I touched—and they had been unchanged for decades—reminded me of what a mama’s boy I was. I had watched my mother make this and that on my tiptoes next to the yellow Formica counter. I had savored the sweetness of the batters from the beaters and the bowls, removing each speck with a spatula, and then with my tongue.

  “Make sure it’s something halfway healthy,” Bruce said as he came into the kitchen.

  “You’re getting kasha.”

  “Skip the varnishkes, please. A vegetable or two would be good. I haven’t seen a vegetable in a week, I swear.”

  “There’s some broccoli. I’ll cook it up for you. Some chicken livers. A little onion, and we’ll be done.”

  “What about Jenny? She told me she was coming over with a main dish.”

  “Oh shit, I forgot. I just wanted to cook something. The kasha is already on the stove. You get varnishkes, too. You can’t have kasha without varnishkes. It’s an ironclad rule.”

  “Those are the old rules, Sasha. We make the rules now. We’re the grown-ups.”

  “If you’re a grown-up, you don’t look like you’re making good rules. You’ve been looking like shit all day.”

  “Thanks for the compliment. I’m forty-one, you know. In my twenties, I could party and wake up the next day fresh as a fucking daisy. Now look at me. Takes me two days to recover.”

  “Your body is telling you to give up that shit.”

  “No, it’s telling me to be more picky.”

  “What is your connection with Jenny, anyway?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s ancient history. We both went to Madison West, but she wasn’t in my crowd. Then I was off to Williams. Probably the last time I saw her was twenty-five years ago. She had a fantastic bat mitzvah party, if I remember correctly. Brought in a DJ from Milwaukee.”

  “No expense spared.”

 
“I saw her two days ago, though. That’s why she’s coming tonight.”

  “You invited her over to cook dinner?” I wanted to know who had set up this date.

  “Kind of. It was her idea. But I encouraged it.”

  “And what exactly happened?”

  “She asked about you. My idea was to figure out a way for her to find out how you were doing. She came up with dinner.” This sounded both plausible and not made up.

  “Well, whatever she’s cooked, it better go with kasha and vanishkes.”

  “Everything goes with kasha and varnishkes.”

  “Is that a new rule?”

  “No. It’s a stupid excuse for ignoring that someone is cooking for us.”

  “I had no idea you were a shadchan.”

  My cousin smiled at the thought of being a matchmaker in a shtetl. “It’s a talent that I do have, actually. I’m good at arranging and organizing all matters. Ask Barbra. Ask Reba. They’ll both vouch for me. Do me a favor.”

  “What?”

  “When Jenny comes, do not drop into that phony Russian accent of yours. You sound like a street-corner phone-card hawk in Brighton Beach.”

  “How do I sound now?”

  “OK, that works. But I still don’t understand how someone who came here at the age of four can even have a hint of Moscow in his voice. If you start saying zees for ‘this’ I’ll kick you under the table, you understand?”

  When Jenny came, there was no need for table kicks. Initially I had to work hard to avoid slipping into my alter ego of émigré intellectual, a warmer, kinder, and indeed softer version of my father. In my forties I had added the air of wisdom gained through experience. This addition to my bag of tricks seemed surprisingly effective for a subset of the American female public. As they say in both Yiddish and Gaelic (and doubtless another dozen languages at least), for every pot there is a lid. But that night I was just me, and that meant I was quieter than usual, more earnest, and undoubtedly a lot more boring. Take away my alter ego and what’s left is the heart and soul of a typical unvarnished Midwesterner.