by Lara Vapnyar
My conversation with Victor wasn’t going that well, and it wasn’t helping that I couldn’t focus on what he was saying but instead kept staring at him, trying to persuade myself that Victor’s slanted green eyes and wavy light brown hair made him more handsome than B.
But then Victor mentioned that before he switched to business he’d earned a PhD in physics (mathematical physics, to be precise). Math! I thought. How wonderful! Now we would have something to talk about.
I brought up the obnoxious Carl Friedrich Gauss.
“Of all the Germans to hate, you pick Gauss!” Victor said. He laughed for a long time, then told me that he used to be like the young Gauss, when he was a child. He was a rude, smart-alecky little prick. He grew up in a small village, where nobody cared about math, not his mother or his older brother—least of all their high school math teacher, an old drunk with digestive problems that made him belch all the time. Victor liked to correct him, which made the teacher shake with rage. There were times when Victor would raise his hand and the teacher would yell: “Shut the fuck up!” That teacher did a noble thing, though: he pulled a lot of strings to get Victor into a great boarding school for mathematically gifted children. Victor was positive that he wouldn’t have become what he became if not for that school. But back then, he wasn’t grateful to his teacher at all. He assumed that he just wanted to get rid of his most annoying student.
“Did you like that school?” I asked.
“No, I hated it. I missed my mom.”
It was this confession that warmed me to Victor.
“Was your mom proud that you got accepted?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” Victor said. “I don’t think she understood the significance of that.”
Well, my mother certainly understood the significance of my failing the Gauss test. I couldn’t help but notice the immediate shift in her approach to doing math with me. Instead of focusing on complex mathematical concepts, she began to explain how textbooks worked.
Here is the most important thing I learned. All math textbooks use stuff stolen from older textbooks, which use stuff stolen from even older textbooks in their turn. Some of the problems date as far as antiquity, and textbook authors have used them again and again, going to great lengths to update or renovate them. Not in terms of the math, no. The math stays the same. They are simply making the subject matter more suitable to the needs of their time, adding humor or pragmatism or socialist fervor. The better the problem, the more reincarnations it has had.
Here is one example. A truly ancient problem about Brahmins counting gold disks.
The older Brahmin says to the younger: “Give me one disk from your pile. Then I will have twice as much as you do!” And the younger answers: “No, you give me one disk from your pile. Then we will have the same number of disks.” The question is how many disks each of them has at the moment of speaking.
I found that problem in at least seven different books. The same exact problem. The characters were the only thing that was different.
In one book, the characters were shepherds counting sheep.
In another, peasants dividing potatoes.
Children arguing over candy.
Children arguing over berries.
Dogs fighting over bones. (Talking dogs, no less!)
World War II soldiers distributing missiles.
Astronauts allotting food rations.
The main part of my job was to pore over all of our textbooks and pick the problems that were good enough to be stolen for my mother’s new book.
We had hundreds of math textbooks at home, old and new. The older ones were so delicate that I imagined their pages could turn into sand at any minute and slip through my fingers in little trickles.
Not all math textbooks were good though.
“You know who I hate?” I asked my mother once.
“Who?”
(No, not Gauss. I would have never admitted to my mother that I hated Carl Friedrich Gauss, because it would have revealed my disappointment at not being a genius.)
“Tolstoy!”
Our bookshelves were sagging under the weight of Tolstoy’s prose, but back then I knew Tolstoy only by the thin volume filled with math problems and educational fairy tales specially designed for the children of peasants.
Note to a curious reader. Tolstoy believed that illiterate peasants possessed greater truth and wisdom, yet for some reason he was obsessed with educating them.
My mother agreed with me. Most of Tolstoy’s math problems were convoluted and imprecise. His stories for children my teacher often assigned to us weren’t much better—all so dull and moralistic. But then I didn’t see the point in reading any kind of fiction.
Sasha, who was an avid reader, would always try to push one or another novel on me. “What’s it about?” I would ask. He’d say “life” or “people” or “love.” And I would go, “Urggh,” and say, “Go do math.”
I didn’t tutor Sasha in math anymore, because Rita wanted him to pass the entrance exam to a school for gifted children, and they hired a professional tutor for that. I asked my mother if I should try and take that exam too, but she said no. “You don’t need that stupid school!” I didn’t know how to interpret her words. I didn’t need that school because I was naturally smart, or I didn’t need that school because I wasn’t smart enough? Or perhaps I didn’t need any extra work, because I enjoyed working on math textbooks so much.
My favorite of all our math textbooks was published in 1952, shortly before Stalin’s death. It was so good that it won a Stalin Prize, which was obviously the most prestigious award of that time.
Most of the problems in the book were centered on acts of heroism committed by ordinary Soviet people. There were all these udarniks trying to do more than the daily norm at their factories, there were young trainees trying to outwork each other, there were eager collective farmworkers milking their cows dry to get the most milk.
But this wasn’t why I cherished the book so much. I cherished it because it made me experience my first orgasm.
The problem that did it for me was about two Soviet schoolchildren eager to do extra schoolwork.
Here it is. See if you can resist its erotic power.
A boy and a girl went to the outskirts of their town to take meteorological measurements. After they were done with their measurements, the boy and the girl took a rest on a grassy hill. There was a factory in the distance, a steam engine going past the factory, and a steamboat going down the river.
“What was the speed of the wind in our measurement?” the boy asked.
“Seven meters per second,” the girl said.
“That gives me enough to calculate the speed of that train,” the boy said.
“How is that possible?” the girl asked.
“Just look,” the boy said.
“Right!” the girl said. “Now I see it too!”
Looking at the picture below, calculate the speed of the train.
Getting under that spell yet? No? Really?
Here is how it worked for me.
“A boy and a girl went to the outskirts of their town to take meteorological measurements.”
A Boy and a Girl. Went alone together. To a remote deserted place. Were they holding hands? Maybe they weren’t holding hands in the beginning, but then the girl stumbled and grabbed the boy’s arm to keep her balance.
“After they were done with their measurements, the boy and the girl took a rest on a grassy hill.”
Rest on a grassy hill? Were they sitting, were they lying? Probably lying. Lying in the grass. Was it warm? Was it dry? Grass could stain your clothes. The girl must have thought of that. She must have spread something on the grass. She must have spread the Pravda newspaper. Or perhaps, the Young Pioneers’ Pravda. And so they were lying alone together, in the soft grass, on top of the rustling Pravda. They must have used something to prop up their heads, or they wouldn’t have been able to see the factory and the river. Most likely their sc
hoolbags. Their heads were very close to each other and inching still closer. Until their faces were so close together that they were afraid to breathe.
Up until I turned thirteen, I thought the pinnacle of sex was a kiss, and was too scared and excited to imagine what happened during the kiss. I didn’t have any opportunity to practice, because I had a chastity belt attached to my teeth.
But that didn’t prevent me from fantasizing.
I was the girl resting on that grassy hill with a boy. With Sasha. With Sasha’s older brother, Misha. Or better yet various men who pressed against me on buses and trains.
I had begun touching myself a few months before that. I would lie down with a book but soon enough feel distracted by a certain disturbance brewing inside me. Then I would put my fingers inside my panties and stroke the external parts to quiet that disturbance down. But those attempts never culminated in something explosive and were usually terminated when I heard my grandmother’s shuffling in the adjacent room.
That time, after reading the math problem, I found that I couldn’t stop, and soon I felt that something irreversible was happening, that I lost control over my body, and I was being carried away to the place of no return. And when I did return from that place, and lay on my bed with that textbook facedown on my chest and my puckered fingers still inside my panties, trembling and counting the remaining spasms, I was completely overwhelmed by the terrifying power of what had happened.
Meanwhile, my mother’s reading craze was getting worse and worse. More novels made an appearance, along with several thick magazines. She would spend whole evenings reading, and sometimes when I woke at night, I would see her reading. And sometimes I would even catch her reading when she was supposed to be working on her textbooks. She was neglecting our work for the sake of what, exactly?
I also noticed that she’d started spending more time on the phone, usually with Rita, talking about someone named Sergey, with a stupid dreamy expression on her face.
The next piece of reading that made an appearance at our house was a bunch of typed pages fastened together by a long rusty paper clip. My mother would read them again and again, every time with the same delirious smile on her face. One time she fell asleep while reading. I found the pages lying by her pillow after she left for work.
These were poems. By Joseph Brodsky—I’d never heard that name before. And they weren’t clean and easy to understand like the poems we had to recite in school.
One was especially baffling. A man started by embracing a woman and went to list all the furniture in the room. The last stanza also mentioned a moth and an apparition, probably to suggest that the entire poem had a deeper meaning, which I didn’t get. Another thing that I didn’t get was the power the poem seemed to have over my mother.
I summoned Sasha for help. He took the pages from me with piety and whispered: “Brodsky. I’ve heard about him.” This annoyed me to no end. Sasha had been accepted into that fancy school, and had immediately acquired a new haughtiness that I hated. He read the poems in silence, then out loud in a half whisper, following the lines with his long nose, nodding now and then. He spent the longest time on the poem about furniture, moth, and apparition. Then he asked if he could borrow the pages. I said no. Sasha sighed and told me that even though he felt like he understood the poems, he couldn’t possibly explain them to me.
“Well, at least tell me what they are about!” I said.
He looked at me with pity, as if my inability to understand poetry made me some sort of mental invalid. (I understood math, math was tougher!)
“They are about love,” he said.
“They are not!” I screamed, and kicked him out of the apartment.
A few days later I spotted tickets on my mother’s desk. To Taganka Theater. For the new play based on Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. I hadn’t read the novel, but my classmates talked about it all the time, and this Taganka Theater was supposed to be amazing. I yelped in delight.
My mother blushed and said that she was going with her colleague. “They’re promising nudity, so it’s hardly suitable for a child.”
Oh, so now at fourteen, I was suddenly a child!
My mother took great pains to look good for that performance. She dyed her white hair a creepy silver-gray color and she bought a button-down shirt, clingy and pink.
She looked ugly in that shirt, white as a ghost. “I look awful, don’t I?” she asked me. I confirmed with a little too much eagerness.
She ran into the bedroom and kneeled in front of our wardrobe, trying to find something buried under the pile of discarded shoes. She emerged with an old purse that she hadn’t used in a very long time. She shook its contents out onto the floor and proceeded to rummage through a small pile of sticky coins, crumbs, and old pills. Then she found what she was looking for. A lipstick tube. The last time my mother had used lipstick was seven years earlier, so that tube must have been at least that old. My mother removed the top from the tube and twisted the bottom part to the right until a scuffed column of bright pink was revealed. She rushed to the mirror and swiped the lipstick forcefully across her lips. The rancid smell filled the room. I made loud gagging sounds. My mother threw the tube to the floor and wiped the stinking lipstick off her mouth with both hands. She looked like she was about to cry, but I didn’t feel any pity for her. I felt anger, lots and lots of anger, and also shame, so much shame that I found it physically unbearable. I wanted to kick her, but instead I started to laugh. My mother pushed me away and ran out of the apartment.
As soon as she left, it occurred to me that I had a chance to see with my own eyes the man who was stealing my mother from me. He would have to see my mother to the door after the show, because that was what lovers in Soviet movies always did.
The play was to end at 10:00 PM, and I estimated that they would arrive between 10:50 and 11:15. My grandparents were asleep by 10:30, so at exactly 10:50 I went to the kitchen, moved the stool to the window overlooking the entrance, sat down, and pressed my face to the glass. The kitchen was dark, and I could see our street all the way down to the bus stop. This was early March, and there was still plenty of hard dirty snow covering the ground in ugly patches. At this time of night, the buses were rare. I saw our drunk plumber, Uncle Pasha, get off one and stagger down the street. I saw a woman I didn’t know run toward the stop. I saw a couple of stray dogs making sad circles in the snow around the tightly closed garbage bin. Our window frame was so rusty and old that it didn’t close all the way. I was getting cold and I wanted to pee, but I didn’t want to risk missing my mother. I kept my face pressed to the glass. Another bus pulled up to our stop. A short, stocky man with a briefcase got off, turned toward the bus, and offered his hand to a woman in a fur hat with long flaps. My mother had the same hat. Then I saw that the woman was my mother. The man took her under the arm and they started walking toward our building. The closer they got, the fatter and older the man appeared to be. He looked almost as old as my grandfather! He wore a felt hat. At one point the wind made his hat fly away, and I saw that he was almost completely bald. He couldn’t possibly be my mother’s lover! Why would I even think that? I must have read too many romantic math problems.
The man was clearly a mere colleague, like my mother had said. I felt like a fool. I was about to run back to bed, but I decided to watch to the end, just in case. They stopped by the entrance. The man was speaking, making wild gestures with his hands. He must have been telling a joke, because my mother started to laugh. She laughed hysterically for quite a long time, until the man grabbed my mother by the flaps of her fur hat and pulled her close and kissed her. The shock was so great that I had to grab on to the edge of the windowsill to keep my balance. Everything around me was unbearable, from the chipped windowsill to the greasy linoleum floor to my mother’s slippers I had on my feet. I kicked them off and ran barefoot to the bedroom, where I climbed into bed and turned to the wall or rather to the bookcase.
My mother walked in in about ten minutes
or so. I pretended to be asleep. She climbed into her bed but kept the night-light on. The rustling of pages told me that she was reading. I guessed that the book she was reading was another gift from the bald man, and that he must have carried it in his ugly briefcase. Then she fell asleep, but I couldn’t, because as soon as I closed my eyes I imagined my mother with her lover. By the age of fourteen I was slightly better informed about the sexual act. I had read my share of the greasy, poorly copied pages that my classmates passed under the table in school. The thought of my mother doing those things with her lover was intolerable. It made me nauseous from disgust. I was afraid that if I fell asleep I would dream all of that, so I forced myself to keep my eyes open. I lay facing the book spines, as I did when I was little, and they reminded me of my silly prayers: “Bunny, mouse, doggy, cat. Make my mommy love me back.” The memory was so embarrassing that I started to cry.
But even that wasn’t enough to make me rebel. What did it for me was the teeth exercises.
This was a recent thing the orthodontist had added to my orthodontic treatment. We did the exercises as a group, ten kids ages seven to fifteen. We sat on the floor in front of a large mirror with our mouths open. All of us had two rows of braces, one each for the upper and lower teeth, connected by a tight rubber band. The band made moving our jaws painful and difficult, which was the point of this technique, I guess. I was so close to the mirror that the glass got clouded from my wet labored breathing. I was the oldest and the tallest in the group. I still had closely cropped hair, my pale thin face made inexplicably ugly by my open mouth.
I was suddenly very angry with my mother. She had made me ugly, she had made me friendless, she hadn’t let me go to a good school, and then she had betrayed me! Abandoned me for the sake of her ugly old lover! I jumped to my feet and stormed out of that room. I ran all the way to the subway, the rubber band still bonding my teeth. There was a row of kiosks by the subway entrance. I hid behind one of them, in bushes smelling of old snow and dog and human urine, removed the rubber band, and unfastened my braces—it took me a long time, because of all those little hooks and bolts. Then I threw them into the garbage bin on top of crumpled pages of Pravda and half-eaten ice cream cones.