The Mathematician’s Shiva Read Online Free PDF Page A

image before in his mind and in his dreams. Until now, he thought it was an angel holding him as a young boy, comforting him, protecting him. He always imagined that this angel had wings. But in the bar, when he hears the name Rachela, the image appears again and the wings are not there. It’s not an angel that is holding him. This is how memory works, I know, full of clichés precisely because the pictures we hold in our minds are usually the most trite.
    “You’ve met this Rachela?” my uncle asked the professor.
    “Yes. She is without peer. Born in Poland. Educated in Moscow.”
    “Born in Vladimir-Volynski, yes? Jewish, but with the face of a Pole, broad, not like mine.”
    “How do you know this?”
    “That woman is my sister.” As my uncle said this he reached out and hugged the mathematician. I know this bone-crushing hug, its ability to force every molecule of oxygen out of your lungs and make you understand that true vitality requires some awareness that life is both fragile and temporary. My uncle is binary. He is either at rest or fully alive.
    Now I am not trying to pull your heartstrings with this tale of long-lost siblings finding each other. It is not my style to dwell on the sentimental, but neither can I avoid it. I am stone-cold sober as I write this part of my story, although I do admittedly drink too much sometimes. My uncle is an emotional man through and through. With my parents, I can, if I wish, be distracted from their tumult and raw nerves by their work, so elegant, pure, and beautiful. But there is no other side to my uncle. Just thinking of him immediately makes me think of his rough beard scratching against my cheeks as he holds me and kisses one side, then the other. Through all of his years, he has attracted women who would, if asked, do anything in their power to come to his aid. I know exactly why. Who can resist such a life force?
    After the mathematician left the bar, my uncle called the home of Rachela Karnokovitch in Madison, Wisconsin. His English was still rudimentary, so he began in Polish. He introduced himself and told my mother where he was born. You’d think my mother would have been surprised by this call. What were the odds of such a thing happening? But no. This most logical of women was always sure, somehow, that her brother survived. Every Yom Kippur she would light a
yahrtzeit
[memorial day] candle for her mother. But she was convinced her brother, little Shlomo, still lived. When she prayed it wasn’t for his life. It was for the hope that one day she would see him again.
    The conversation fell into the familiar almost immediately as my uncle heard that perfect accent of eastern Poland. His money was running out—this was back in the days of AT&T’s monopoly, when phone calls even over distances of 120 miles could quickly eat at daily wages—and he told his sister to call him back. He waited for what seemed like a ridiculous amount of time in the frigid Chicago telephone booth, the vapor from his lungs forming clouds, and when the phone rang, he brought the receiver to his ears, longing to hear that voice again. My mother told him the story of his childhood, of the planes flying overhead in 1939 and how their mother, literally hedging her bets and not believing her little boy had the strength to travel to the unknown in Russia, left him behind with her sister in Vladimir-Volynski.
    My uncle was two years old at the time. And the only real memory he had of his days in Vladimir-Volynski started to make sense as he heard this story. Images will come to him over the next year. His earliest memory is from 1941. A dark-haired woman is holding him against her breast on a clear day in an open, grass-covered field. There is the sound of gunfire and the woman falls. He clings to her body even as she falls into a pit, and pretends to sleep, hoping that perhaps if he simply closes his eyes he can will this moment away. He remembers the musty smell of the dirt covering him,