Authors: Peter Buwalda
She’s not downstairs. That usually means she’s in her workshop at the back of the yard. In the kitchen he drinks a glass of water. He gazes indecisively into the darkness beyond the utility room, switches on the outside light and walks through the overgrown winter grass where, he sees, thistles are growing. Halfway there he can already hear the buzz of the circular table saw and the vacuum. He opens the heavy door and remains standing in the bricked opening. About twenty meters away, under fluorescent lights suspended on thin cables, his wife is piloting a plank of wood along the blade. She does not notice him, she’s wearing hearing protectors.
How to begin? He inhales the pleasant, constructive scent of freshly planed wood. He is grateful she doesn’t notice him. As always, he admires her creativity, his wife thinks up something, sketches it, lets it materialize from her fingers, sells it. As he watches her—she is concentrated, focused, swift; her overweight body seems to work to her advantage among the machines, as though it were
a precondition of her mastery—the urgency ebbs from him like a receding tide.
Should he approach her? Tap her on the shoulder, honey, come sit down, there’s something I have to tell you. What touches him at this exact moment, this impossible moment, is her cheerful pragmatism in standing by
him
all those years whenever it came to his son. As catastrophes small and large piled up around the boy, she was always the one who put things in perspective, she was the one who offered solutions, saw points of view without which he’d have sunk into something that might have turned into a depression. Where on earth would he have been without her? She’s the first one to dismiss that thought, sweep it off the table, just like she does with the curly wood shavings now; he sincerely believes that without this woman he’d still be lying on the Antonius Matthaeuslaan, plastered leg in traction for eternity, with a beard reaching all the way to the Willem van Noortplein, wallowing in his thwarted Olympic ambitions.
For months there was no getting through to him. One look at his judo suit and the tears welled up in his eyes. Sometimes he and Margriet heard her bursts of laughter, loud, light, irresistibly cheerful, right through the kitchen floor, straight through their own sullen, disgruntled silence. A combustion engine had moved in under them, a female force that made their windowpanes rattle in their sashes. After he had that accident with the scooter and Margriet, by necessity, went out to work, and the woman from downstairs had started making ever-so-friendly house calls, from that moment on he forgot his wife and little son. He has to admit it. They ceased to exist. He lay on his cot, and next to him sat Tineke.
Now too, he is well aware of why he fell in love with her: that vitality. Her lust for life, her exuberance. The way she stood there
at that machine, the one they bought together at a factory in Münster, where she apparently knew everything there was to know about brands and model numbers, interrogated the salesman in fluent German about rpms and blade positions. She was his new beginning, she repaired his willpower. That is why he cannot walk over to her now and disassemble himself in front of her.
Not only did Tineke’s morning visits draw him out of his syrupy self-pity, but also without her he would never have discovered mathematics. She rang the bell at least once, sometimes twice a week, mostly when Margriet was sitting at the mail-sorting machine across town, and then he would yank the rope that disappeared via a pulley into the stairwell, down to the front door bolt, and she clumped up the stairs, with or without Joni on her arm—blond, large, attractive, cheery, interested, intelligent. She emptied his thermos into the kitchen sink and made fresh coffee, helped him onto the balcony if it was sunny, sometimes brought a loose chair or table leg that needed sanding, sat next to his bed and chatted to him about her day, her life, about how the construction of Hoog Catharijne was coming along downtown. On one of those mornings she came to cheer him up she brought him a box full of reading material:
Libelle, Ariande, Privé, Panorama
, a home and garden magazine, and some of it such junk he wondered why she read it, why that blues singer of hers read it.
“From my mother,” she said, and told him that her parents lived in Tuindorp, the neighborhood where she’d grown up, and only later in the week did he rummage through the box, and maybe already then, or later, three small moss-green books with Olympic rings slid out, it was a symbol he couldn’t look at without going all bilious, and those rings nearly prevented him from thumbing through the rest of the books.
Mathematics. Arithmetic. Long ago, in Delft, algebra and geometry
came easily to him, which was the only reason he did MULO-B in high school: as few languages as possible, but all the so-called difficult subjects,
they
were a breeze. No time for anything but judo. Everything—his penchant for motorcycles and cars, his chess set, the high school, where his father had hoped he would study—took the backseat to judo. In retrospect, it was remarkable that no one, including himself, found it the least bit strange that he passed math and physics exams without doing any homework, without studying, yes,
without prior knowledge
. Let’s see, what do they want from me—that’s how he took an exam. Got an eight out of ten by inventing the wheel on the spot; right there in the lecture hall he figured out how to factor a quadratic equation.
It may have been his boundless boredom, with the mother of all wet blankets having been tossed over his life, that made him take a look at the problems in those booklets. He saw mathematics for the first time in twelve years, for the first time since the Oranje-Nassau MULO. He skimmed the word problems, the geometric figures and illustrations. There were five problems in all. He took a ballpoint pen and, on the cardboard cover he’d torn off one of the magazine folders, he tackled the first problem, fussed around with the data he’d distilled from the question, made a rough sketch. Just like a joke occurs to you, or the idea for a limerick, a solution welled up in him. OK, it’s got to go like this. And if not that, then like this. After forty-five minutes he had cracked the first problem, his solution was spot-on, he knew it for sure. He went straight to the second problem, and then yet another, until soon enough he himself throbbed with spot-on-ness. If he hadn’t been confined to a plaster cast he’d have bounded down the stairs to ring Tineke’s doorbell and show her what he’d accomplished.
Usually he just sat out the tedious hours; in that kitchen it seemed like evening would never come, and when evening did
come it seemed bedtime would never come, but now, suddenly, Margriet was standing there in front of him with Wilbert, who wasn’t at school yet and spent days at his grandmother’s in Wijk C. It was already getting dark, but everyday reality passed him by, he’d misplaced it somewhere, he was lost in an opaque, radiant world where closely related phenomena were either true or false, with such clarity it filled him with a thrilling energy. Rather than staring peevishly out into space, or picking petty arguments with Margriet—this wasn’t her choice either, to be cooped up with such a bitter old fart—he spent the rest of the evening engrossed in the moss-green booklets, and part of the night too; it was cold, he still remembers, it froze in the kitchen, but he let his arms and fingers go numb, and when he’d answered all the questions he went through them again, solved a few in an even better way, out of camaraderie with the problem itself—what kind of feeling was that?—and honed his scribbled calculations or improvised embellishments.
One of the problems stuck with him ever since, not so much because of the Olympic connotation, or its inventiveness, but because he came up with a variant of his own: “ada/kok = .fastfastfast …” was the given, and the question was which digits could replace the letters so that the equation would be correct. He licked that one pretty fast, but had to work much harder to give Ada a friend: “pele × play = kick × goal,” the fruits of incredible mental acrobatics that kept him awake until he heard Margriet showering upstairs.
Pelé and his goal was the first thing that Tineke’s father wanted to talk about. Unannounced and totally to his surprise, a week later the man stood next to his makeshift bed; he was more gentleman than anything, he wore a distinguished lemon-yellow spencer and had soft white hair that looked as though it had been washed and touched up on the way over. “So this is the culprit,” said Mr. Profijt, his future father-in-law, mathematics teacher at the Christelijk
Gymnasium on the Diaconessenstraat. The elegant hand that sported a slim wedding ring held up the fully scribbled magazine cover that, he gathered, Tineke had brought him. “Young man,” he said earnestly, “I’ve spent my whole weekend on that Pelé kicking a goal. I can’t crack it. Save me.” Whereby Tineke’s father squatted down next to his bed and Sigerius explained, step by step, in a ring notebook the man pulled out of a leather attaché case with a flap, how he constructed the brainteaser.
“Beautiful,” said the man who was Joni’s grandfather. “Robust. And elegant at the same time. Playful too. My daughter claims you’re not a mathematician. She is mistaken. Where did you study, if I may ask?”
“In Delft,” he replied. “Oranje-Nassau MULO.”
A moment of silence. Then: “That’s impossible,” Profijt said. Tineke’s father had a friendly voice in which he wrapped schoolmasterish sentences. “It is
not
possible that you’ve only done MULO.”
“I’m afraid so, Mr. Profijt.”
“Then you must have had help. Is this your handwriting? Do you know what these are?” He tapped one of the moss-green booklets.
“Math problems?”
“These exercise books contain the second-round problems from the National Mathematics Olympiad, 1969 edition. These five open questions, young man, were devised by the brightest mathematical minds in the country. The most talented A+ high school students train for a year, only to bang into this wall of mathematical ingenuity.”
“Aha.”
“The majority of that elite corps, the flower of the nation, one could well call it, scores two out of five. At best. Twenty points out of a possible fifty. Those students can go home well pleased. The
top ten score between thirty and forty. Sometimes, but only sometimes, once every five years or so, there will be an exceptionally gifted boy among them, sadly they are always boys, a lad who gets almost everything right. Only once in the history of the Olympiad, I believe in 1963, did someone get a perfect score. Like you did. Zero mistakes. Fifty points. Flawless.”
“Nice.” From the middle of that little kitchen, which he now saw as unbearably filthy, musty, and shabby, Tineke stood beaming at him as though he’d just been knighted. She resembled her father, their faces had the same disarming roundness.
“It is not
nice
,” said Profijt. “Because it is
impossible
. I’ve studied your work with extreme interest. At times it’s brusque, mostly surprisingly graceful. And always efficacious. It appears that certain operations and standard formulas have been derived—no,
designed
—on the spot. On this piece of cardboard are two, I repeat,
two
different proofs for Pythagoras.” He stopped briefly, weightily. “One of them, I’ve never even seen before. The other is three centuries old. If what you say is true, then I must congratulate you.”
“Dad,” Tineke said, “of course what Siem says is true. Come on, give them to him.”
Her father extended his hand. “Congratulations.” This was the first mathematician whose hand he shook, hundreds more would follow, perhaps thousands, but Tineke’s father was the very first. The hand was not calloused like a judo hand; it was also unlike his in-laws’ hands, which were clammy and jittered if they weren’t holding a bottle.
“You’ll be laid up another couple of months?” Profijt brought his attaché case to his lap and carefully removed a small stack of books. “I shall take responsibility for providing you with nourishment.” In addition to four Olympiad booklets he called “snack
food,” Tineke’s father gave him something he had saved since his own student days: books sheathed in brown paper on integral calculus, on linear algebra, on integer theory, but also
A Course of Pure Mathematics
by G. H. Hardy, a final-year gymnasium textbook, Struik’s
History of Mathematics
, and even a satirical mathematics novella called
Flatland
.
“Work through them and let me know how you make out. Promise me that. And when you’ve finished I’ll bring some more. In return I would ask that as soon as you can walk again we pay a visit to the Uithof.”
“The Uithof?”
“The Utrecht mathematics faculty. And get well quickly, if you please. You’ve no time to waste.”
She sees him. She switches off the saw, takes off the ear protectors. “Coffee? Yes, please!” she calls out, laughing; slaps her work gloves onto a workbench outfitted with a variety of vises; glides, smiling, past a futuristic cabinet. She approaches him—carefree, unaware. His thoughts bounce over their countless discussions about Wilbert, with the late ’80s as desperate nadir, arguments that challenged everything they thought they knew about parenting. After the court case their marriage nearly fell apart, worn out as they were by that nut case. Yes, once Wilbert was out of the way they started arguing with
each other
, about everything. As a result she bloated up like a balloon, abandoned all discipline. After a hostile year she went off to a summer course in England, a top-notch academy for furniture makers, “the chance of a lifetime,” but in fact it was pure escapism. She spent three months in Dorset and he missed her terribly. So badly that before she got back he invested a small fortune transforming the abandoned stall into a studio:
troughs and timber out, table saws in, storage racks, compressors for the vacuum, staple guns, a whale of a veneer press.
“What’s up?” she asks cheerfully, looking at him under halogen lighting so bright that he’s afraid she can read his thoughts.
Here? Now? What a mistake to think that he can spill out his pathetic, putrid news here, under the rafters of this hopeful hut. For ten years now, this workshop has symbolized the success of their marriage, every piece of furniture that has emerged from it reminds them that they have a grip on their lives, that they do have the power to influence events. And he’s going to tell her here, of all places, about Wilbert and Joni? Maybe because he doesn’t answer, his mouth just a slit from which he can see his breath, Tineke picks up the conversation. “You know what I was just thinking?” she says, taking his hand between her surprisingly warm fingers. “Wouldn’t it be a great idea to fly to California in February, around carnival time? Surprise Joni? I think that would be such fun.”