The Mathematician’s Shiva

by Stuart Rojstaczer

  [We humbly stand before you, beseeching to hear from you, and to hear your wisdom]

  Back and forth they went in the dimly lit room. Shimon and the old men were engaged in a call and response. After a few turns they had established a well-defined cadence, and I started to gain a sense that even if what I was witnessing was 100 percent hokum, there was something inherently otherworldly, magical, and beautiful about it. My uncle’s eyes were closed. He was taking it all in aurally. Shimon’s high-pitched voice sang a well-known Hassidic melody. The old men followed with their droning. My uncle was perhaps fifteen feet away from me as I watched him, first reciting the words he was hearing, and then mumbling something altogether different. Perhaps other people were doing much the same as my uncle, but I wasn’t watching them.

  My uncle was feeling something deep inside him, I knew. I’ve never felt what believers hold inside their hearts, and I certainly have never felt what I witnessed happening to my uncle in that room. I heard his voice grow louder and louder, mixing with the words of Shimon and the old Cohanim. My uncle wasn’t speaking in Hebrew like them, but in Polish. His eyes seemed almost forced shut by then, and he was using not his modern Polish, but the formal Polish of my mother.

  In the middle of the rising din of Shimon and the Cohanim, my uncle shot up from his chair, his hands resting on the table, his eyes still closed, with tears beginning to run down from the crevices of his crow’s-feet. “Skoncz z tym szalenstwem [Stop this nonsense]!” he shouted, his booming voice taking over the room. “Stop this right now!” he then shouted out in English. The room went silent in an instant.

  “Are you all right, Shlomo?” Anna asked.

  “I’m more than all right.” He paused to wipe the tears from his face. “Turn on the lights, Anna. All the way, please.” The new brightness of the room caused me and probably everyone else to squint. “I had a memory from long ago. From Vladimir-Volynski. I’d rather have not remembered it, to tell you the truth. That place was a living hell. And not just for Jews. For Poles, too.”

  “What did you remember?” Anna asked.

  “I don’t want to say. It must have happened when I was three or so. I can’t believe I can remember it now.” My uncle’s face was white.

  “Three years old. That wasn’t a good time,” Zhelezniak said. “Not for my family in Russia. We’re the same age, you and I. We starved, both of us. My father died that year in the army. I only know what he looks like from pictures.”

  “Lots of people died. Whole families. Back then I was living with my aunt, and we were on a farm. It was dangerous, I was told. A Polish farmer was taking care of us. He was a kind man. I liked him. We were in his barn, living there, I think. I knew all this before.” My uncle paused to strengthen himself so that he could continue. The color in his face came back little by little. He was no longer lost in a nightmare. Instead he was a shtarker, a formidable man, again.

  “But today, just now, I know why we left his farm. The Ukrainians. They must have come. They wanted him out, just like they wanted all Poles out of Wołyn. Maybe he resisted. Who knows? But one day we walked to his house from the barn. He was there outside. On the door.” My uncle paused and looked into the hallway to his own front door.

  “Nailed to the door, his arms stretched wide like he was Jesus Christ. I’d never seen a dead person before. I’d never seen blood come out of a man’s mouth like that. The place was quiet. We walked inside his house. They were all dead. His whole family had been murdered.”

  “It was a horrible time for everyone,” Anna said.

  My uncle looked directly at Shimon. “I suppose I can thank you for this memory. Tonight, when I saw the faces of those children in that house, it was like I was there again. And I knew. The dead don’t come back. Not to this world. This world is too cruel for anyone to want to come back. Even to speak to the ones they love. There must be a better world to go to. There must be.” My uncle paused again. I could feel the anger rise in him. “What were you thinking, Shimon?”

  A look of panic crossed Shimon’s face. “I was trying to help you. You wanted to hear your sister. I was just trying to assist.”

  “No. That’s not true. You were trying to make a little money. You didn’t care who you hurt along the way.”

  “Easy, Uncle,” I said. “He’s not the worth the trouble.”

  “No, he isn’t,” Anna said. She put her hand on his shoulder, rubbing it slowly.

  My uncle looked at me and then at Anna. “You’re both right about that.” He then turned to Shimon. “I want you out of here. Right now. Immediately. You, your pole dancer of a wife, and your fat, disgusting brother. Your family has caused us nothing but trouble always. Out! Right! Now!” When a Czerneski flies into a rage, a sane person understands immediately that it is time to disappear. Whatever doubts I had about Shimon’s sanity left when I saw him pack up his belongings in a rush.

  “I’m sorry you all had to witness me being so foolish,” my uncle said to the crowd in the room as the Ben-Zvis headed for the door. “I’m not usually this way. I’m sorry to have wasted your time.”

  “You’re still grieving, Shlomo,” Yakov said. “It’s hard, I know. You have nothing to be embarrassed about.”

  “We didn’t come to hear Rachela,” one of the Karanskys said. “We came because you asked us. We came for you. We’re glad we did.”

  “OK, you think I can erase this embarrassment. I wish I could. Trying to hear the dead. I should know better,” my uncle said.

  “It wasn’t a total waste,” Yakov said. “Not for me, Shlomo.”

  “What do you mean, Yakov? Don’t joke with me now. I’m not in the mood.”

  “I’m not joking. There was something about tonight. All the chanting back and forth. Like I was a child in Minsk again in our rabbi’s house on Simchas Torah. It was a special day. People would sing melodies, like what I heard tonight, from the old times. The men would all be drunk. I hadn’t thought about those days in a long time.”

  “And so, you had a good memory. I’m happy to hear someone got something good from this craziness,” my uncle said.

  “More than a good memory. I got an idea. A very important idea.”

  “What idea? My sister’s problem? You understand how to solve it now?”

  “No, not that one. The Navier-Stokes problem is beyond me, and beyond all of us, really. But for a long time I’ve been working on another problem in mathematical physics. Twelve years, actually. I had my doubts I would ever solve it. I thought I might be too old, a has-been. But here in this room, all the chanting, you saying god knows what in Polish, it came to me. An idea. A real idea. A breakthrough, really. I think I can solve this damn problem. Twelve years of nothing, and now this.”

  “You’re not lying to me to make me feel good, right, Yakov? I don’t have patience for liars anymore today.”

  “No, I’m not lying, Shlomo. It’s true. In my head it’s all there because of this crazy night.”

  “You think you can solve the Boussinesq equation problem?” Zhelezniak asked. “Isn’t that what you’ve been working on all these years?”

  “Correct.”

  “No one has been able to solve that problem in seventy years.”

  “I know,” Yakov said. He was grinning.

  “Are you sure?” Zhelezniak asked.

  “The more I think about it, the more I’m sure,” Yakov said.

  “Well, something good came out of this, I guess,” my uncle said. “Now all you mathematicians need to get the hell out of here. I need to apologize to the poor men I brought from the synagogue to help with this travesty.” My uncle looked at the three Cohanim standing at the head of the table, three men who undoubtedly were staying up well past their normal bedtimes. “You can put your shoes on now. We’ll have a few drinks. Then I’ll be happy to drive you home.”

  “I’ll drive them, Shlomo,” Ann
a said. The old men seemed buoyed by the idea of a graceful woman being their chauffeur. “But first things first. I need to know where you keep the alcohol in this monstrosity of a house.”

  CHAPTER 32

  The Truth Really Does Come Out

  DAY 7

  After six eventful days in which God created so very much, the story goes that he rested. The titans of mathematics who had descended upon Madison, Wisconsin, had, save for Yakov, accomplished very little over their six days in my mother’s house, but they, too, in their pale imitation of Adonai, decided that enough was enough. This was all well and good as far as my family was concerned. By the end we were openly hostile to most of them. We sat in the dining room. They worked in the living room. Pascha would squawk some mathematical phrase in Polish whenever one of the mathematicians would enter the kitchen, and I had half convinced myself that these were taunts from a perceptive parrot.

  There is a well-known joke—at least well known in mathematics—about how mathematicians work. A mathematician and a Starbucks barista are each placed in front of a stove with a kettle and a nearby faucet and told to make boiling water. Both do the same thing. They fill the kettle with water from the faucet, light the stove with a match, and place the water-filled kettle on the stove. Mission accomplished.

  The mathematician and the Starbucks barista are next placed in front of a stove with a kettle that they are told is filled with clean water and told to make boiling water yet again. The barista lifts the kettle off the stove for a moment, lights the stove, and puts the kettle back on. The mathematician lifts the kettle off the stove, pours out the water into a sink, puts the newly emptied kettle back on the stove and says, “The problem has been reduced to the previously solved case. Q.E.D.”

  This joke is not so far-fetched for many mathematicians. This is indeed how they think, not just in mathematics, but in life. Solutions to problems never trespass into anything of real value. No water ever gets boiled. Living with such people can be exhausting.

  The truth is, though, that not only mathematicians succumb to this trap of wanting to repeat some pleasant event from the past, the previously solved case, no matter how ridiculous it seems to an observer. We do this, perhaps, in matters of the heart most of all. We try, or at least some of us try, to revisit our past loves in hopes of bringing back that wonderful feeling of connection and passion. Some of us may spend years retracing our steps and try to win back a former lover, convinced that he or she is our one true soul mate.

  In 1973, Peter Orlansky was a twenty-two-year-old Ph.D. with his first university job, an assistant professorship at the University of Wisconsin. My mother was nearly twice his age, confident, poised, elegant, and, unlike any other female mathematician in the United States, accepted as a giant in her field. In contrast, Orlansky, while obviously very, very smart, lacked anything approaching poise and confidence. Physically, he towered above all, including my mother. But his shyness was also apparent to all, and when he lectured in front of a class he seemed incapable of projecting his voice beyond the first two rows. Orlansky, despite his prodigious mathematical talent, was going to go nowhere as an academic without someone mentoring him. “He needs some work, that one,” my mother said of her colleague. If anyone was capable of transforming Peter Orlansky, it was my mother. That’s exactly what she did. Peter Orlansky became my mother’s project for one year.

  Under my mother’s direction, Orlansky began to dress not like a twenty-two-year-old student but like a mature professor, complete with a dark suit, black leather shoes, and tie. He cut his shaggy Beatles ’do and sported the neat look of a Midwestern TV newscaster, combing his hair straight back to reveal his widow’s peak. Making eye contact would always remain difficult for him, but my mother took him to a speech coach, and he not only began to project his voice—which it turned out could boom with authority with the best of them—but also was able, at least in front of a classroom, to sound like a real adult. The childish cadences of his former speech were barely present.

  This surge in confidence, and the emergence of a man who, at least in terms of his public persona, could make a certain type of female undergraduate swoon, was noticed by all. Its cause—my mother’s hard work and creative hand—was also noticed by all. It is a truism that the halls of academia, while filled with people of high intellect, are worse than high school in terms of gossip and sex rumors. It’s true today. It was true in 1973, and back then in the Midwest the word for such things was still “affair.” The vagueness of that word contrasted with the weight it carried. In the Midwest, sexual revolution or no, an affair between a young man and an “older woman” was not a minor thing. It was viewed as unseemly, especially in a professional environment. Within two years Peter Orlansky was gone from the University of Wisconsin, off to the less sexually prudish urban east of Princeton, where the rumor of his affair with my mother seemed to enhance his reputation. A cynic would say that since Princeton couldn’t get my mother on board, they decided to settle for the next best thing, her lover. Of course, no one really knew for certain that Peter Orlansky and my mother had actually been a couple. Like the high school rumor mill, the academic rumor mill was not particularly reliable. My mother certainly wasn’t going to say anything. No one was going to confront her, either.

  Orlansky and my mother would work together on several highly regarded papers and many minor papers over the years. With every publication, the rumors would flourish anew. I never knew what was true and what wasn’t. I was a grown man lost in my own work and personal life. Who my mother did and didn’t sleep with was far less important to me than who I slept and didn’t sleep with. I’d see Orlansky very infrequently, sometimes in Madison, sometimes when I went to Princeton. He was a kind, gentle spirit who never forgot to send me Jewish New Year cards and happy holiday season cards that contained pictures of his children doing cute things.

  I wasn’t thinking about Orlansky at all on the morning of the seventh day of shiva. I woke up and looked outside my window, saw the stars in the sky, and had the urge at the ridiculous hour of 6:00 A.M. to visit my mother’s grave. I knew I’d be going home tomorrow and just wanted to say good-bye one last time, just me in that oh-so-cold cemetery, looking down at the raw frozen earth where my mother’s body lay.

  I quickly put on several layers of clothing and a down coat that I always kept in my mother’s house, brought the Volvo back to life—noting that its battery would not likely last the winter—and drove to Forest Hill with a funeral prayer book on the seat next to me. I nursed a cup of coffee I bought along the way and, while the heater in the boxy sedan slowly kicked in, felt like a cop on duty. All I needed was a donut or two.

  I made the turn into the cemetery. The oak trees were bare of leaves and stark against the sky. I slowly passed tombstone after tombstone along the skinny pavement. Then I saw him in the distance, Peter Orlansky, standing where I had imagined myself standing. He was wearing a fedora and blue wool topcoat over his sport coat and wool pants. That was it.

  Orlansky was my age, give or take a year, and looking at him, I thought a bit about myself and how I looked to others. Up close, you could tell his age. There were the sags under the eyes and a loss of definition around the chin. He still looked good, don’t get me wrong, but like me, I’m sure many now said “sir” as they addressed him. We were no longer young. There wasn’t even a hint in our faces that we once were.

  “How long have you been here, Peter?” I asked as I shook his gloved hand.

  “A while,” he said, looking at the ground.

  “Is all night a while?” I asked.

  “More or less,” he said. “People were going to your uncle’s house. I definitely didn’t want to do that. Coming here seemed like a better idea.”

  “How did you get here?” I asked.

  “I walked.”

  “It’s what, three miles from where you’re staying?”

  “It was good. Cathartic
. That hotel is really a piece of crap, by the way.”

  “It’s always been awful. Even when it was new it wasn’t much. You must be cold.”

  “Oh yes, definitely freezing.”

  “You probably could use something warm. I have some coffee in the car.”

  “No, I’ll be OK.”

  “How were you going to get back?”

  “The same way I came, I guess. My plane doesn’t leave until the afternoon.”

  “How about I drive you back? Save your feet a bit.”

  “It’s probably a good idea. Thanks, Sasha.”

  There is an old joke in Finland, a country proud of its collective introspective character and shyness. “How do you know when a Finnish man likes a woman? He stares at her shoes instead of his.” I noticed that Orlansky was staring at my shoes.

  “I came to say kaddish,” I said. “How about we do it together and then drive back?”

  “Sounds like a good idea.”

  “By the way, at the graveyard ceremony, the rabbi screwed up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He said the standard kaddish, not the one for a burial.”

  “Why didn’t you correct him?”

  “I didn’t want to have anyone stand there any longer than necessary. It was cold. No one would know except for me and my uncle, I thought. He’s a minor league rabbi. You can’t expect much.”

  “So you came back this morning to fix the mistake?”

  “I thought I’d do that, yes. But there were other reasons.”

  “Well, I’m glad you came to do this fix. It’s somehow, I don’t know, reassuring.”

  I held out the little booklet that contained the burial ceremony prayers. Orlansky looked up from our pairs of shoes, now next to each other, to the open page. The sky was beginning to lighten a bit, and we both could make out the words. Orlansky’s voice was loud and clear. He was, in this moment of two middle-aged men mourning the loss of someone they loved, trying to reclaim some strength. Orlansky recited the words the way my grandfather would, using a Polish-accented Hebrew that hadn’t been taught anywhere in decades, and even then, only in Orthodox synagogues and Jewish schools like those I attended in my youth, “Yiskadal, viyiskadash, shimay, rabow.” I fell back into the old cadence and accent easily. When we were finished he said something under his breath, his eyes on my mother’s grave again. I dared not ask him what he said.