The housekeeper and the professor Read Online Free Page A

working for the Professor was
relatively easy: a small house, no visitors or phone calls, and only
light meals for one man who had little interest in food. At other
jobs, I always had to do as much as possible in a short amount
of time; but now I was delighted to have so much time to do a
truly thorough job of cleaning, washing, and cooking. I learned to
recognize when the Professor was beginning a new contest, and
how to avoid disturbing him. I polished the kitchen table to my
heart's content with a special varnish and patched the mattress
on his bed. I even invented various ways to camouflage the carrots
in his dinner.
    The one thing about the job that was always a little tricky was
understanding how the Professor's memory worked. According to
the old woman, he remembered nothing after 1975; but I had no
idea what yesterday meant to him or whether he could think
ahead to tomorrow, or how much he suffered.
    It was clear that he didn't remember me from one day to the
next. The note clipped to his sleeve simply informed him that it
was not our first meeting, but it could not bring back the memory
of the time we had spent together.
    When I went out shopping, I tried to return home within an
hour and twenty minutes. As befit a mathematician, the device in
his brain that measured those eighty minutes was more precise
than any clock. If an hour and eighteen minutes had passed from
the time I walked out the door to the time I got back, I would receive
a friendly welcome; but after an hour and twenty-two minutes,
we were back to "What's your shoe size?"
    I was always afraid of making some careless remark that might
upset him. I nearly bit my tongue once when I started to mention
something the newspaper had said about Prime Minister
Miyazawa. (For the Professor, the prime minister was still Takeo
Miki.) And I felt awful about suggesting that we get a television to
watch the summer Olympics in Barcelona. (His last Olympics
were in Munich.) Still, the Professor gave no sign that this bothered
him. When the conversation veered off in a direction he
couldn't follow, he simply waited patiently until it returned to a
topic he could handle. But, for his part, he never asked me anything
about myself, how long I'd been working as a housekeeper,
where I came from, or whether I had a family. Perhaps he was
afraid of bothering me by repeating the same question again and
again.
    The one topic we could discuss without any worry was mathematics.
Not that I was enthusiastic about it at first. In school, I had
hated math so much that the mere sight of the textbook made me
feel ill. But the things the Professor taught me seemed to find their
way effortlessly into my brain—not because I was an employee
anxious to please her employer but because he was a such a gifted
teacher. There was something profound in his love for math. And
it helped that he forgot what he'd taught me before, so I was free
to repeat the same question until I understood. Things that most
people would get the first time around might take me five, or even
ten times, but I could go on asking the Professor to explain until I
finally got it.
    "The person who discovered amicable numbers must have
been a genius."
    "You might say that: it was Pythagoras, in the sixth century
B.C."
    "Did they have numbers that long ago?"
    "Of course! Did you think they were invented in the nineteenth
century? There were numbers before human beings—
before the world itself was formed."
    We talked about numbers while I worked in the kitchen. The
Professor would sit at the kitchen table or relax in the easy chair
by the window, while I stirred something on the stove or washed
the dishes at the sink.
    "Is that so? I'd always thought that human beings invented
numbers."
    "No, not at all. If that were the case, they wouldn't be so difficult
to understand and there'd be no need for mathematicians. No
one actually witnessed the first numbers come into being—when
we first became aware of them, they'd already