I fumble for the oil lamp in the dark, fingers trembling. I must see the figures once more before I sleep. The lamp flickers, oil soaking the wick unevenly. I wait, eyes adjusting to the stuttering light. It is all a performance, a ritual. I do not need the light to know the formulas that lay bare across my wall. They are the shadows that sing to me as I sleep, the insects that skitter to their holes in the dark. Sometimes in the daylight, I rub the walls raw, picking away at a mistake in Da’s calculations—revealing the moldering wallpaper beneath, stalks of thistle sprouting in a field of functions.
Madga thinks the house spirits teach me maths, drawing equations in the flour as I knead the bread dough. But she is wrong. She sees the inverse as I did when she tried to teach me to knit and I dropped stitches, my hands unable to mirror hers across from me. It is I who teach the house spirits, helping them with their chores, calculating for them the number of thimbles in a kettle, the friction of the cat’s tongue, the melting point of snow on Madga’s boots by the stove. The house spirits study my walls but can make no sense of maths without practical purpose—without being able to calculate the thickness of the steam that moistens Magda’s dark bread. They shake their heads at my proofs and wonder when I will set my equations to tidying up instead of creating more chaos in the house. They shrink at Magda’s shrill scolding when she discovers me awake once more, shadows of line segments stretching behind her.
Magda does not approve of my maths. She scoffs at them as she shoos me back into bed each night. “Your da never should put such things in your head. He thinks he gives you science and logic, but he only fills your heart with dreams that can never come true.” I want to tell her that the proofs are true, are real, that she worries for nothing, but each time she tucks me under my wool blankets so tightly that I have no breath for comforting her. I will tell her in the morning, I think, as the vectors elongate out into infinity and I fall asleep.
Summer comes and Da drags me to the country, away from my walls. He will spend his evenings sitting around a fire with the other scholars discussing Cayley’s theorems or Weierstrass’ latest proof. When I was a child I could play in the shadow of the spitting flames—but now that my skirts sizzle near them, I must be relegated to the women’s party inside, sipping lemonade and tea, uselessly fanning ourselves in layers of lace as they try to think of something to say—but nothing that will break the heat.
I see the smoke rising in the distance, the tendrils curling like the functions on my wallpaper back home and I can’t help but weep in the dark. In the morning I convince Magda that a walk would be good for my constitution. I slip out before she can wipe her hands clean and change her apron to chaperone me. Magda doesn’t think I should wander the Slavic countryside unattended, but I’ve roamed these hills every summer since I was a child, calculating the wavelength of a wheat field undulating in the breeze.
In the fall, Magda plants a star pine in the garden. She digs deep into the dark earth, dirt gathering in her hair, up her arms. “For protection,” she says as she pats the sapling into place. “This will ward off hunger in the winters.” I nod as I calculate the angles between each branch, imagine getting lost in a tessellated forest of star pines with only mathematics to guide me out.
Some mornings, when the sun’s rays are still acute, I run past Magda’s thick brocade skirts, ignoring her muttering and idle kick in my direction. I slip out the door, hearing Magda’s barking from the kitchen window like a squirrel scolding. Soon I am past the gate and out of her sight, but still I run. I won’t let myself stop until the hills begin to flatten and the gritty dirt roads turn into cobblestones beneath my feet. The carriages are still quiet, the horses half asleep as their hooves plod up the street. Only when I begin to see the stony halls of the university do I let myself stop, my dress thick with perspiration.
I can still hear Magda’s voice ringing in my ears when I enter the courtyard, as if her spirit haunts the university. I stand up straighter and slow my gait, hoping no one has noticed me yet. The buildings tower over the rectangular yard, shading my steps to the lecture hall. I have stolen my way in before, but when my hair was wild, hanks tangling behind me, before Magda wrestled it into plaits and pinned them firmly to my scalp. My tidy braids and petticoats mark me as a woman rather than a child. When did I ever ask to be to be anything more than an epsilon, something so small no one ever bothers it? We can hide in our equations and learn so much tucked at the feet of men in tweed suits who think we are not listening. But now, they see me, my ridiculous skirts and bodice, before I may learn anything.
The wooden door to the lecture hall is half-open; Da likes to smell the fresh spring air as he lectures. I shall not go in and dangle my legs through the banister of the balcony above the hall as I once did. But from the crack in the door I can hear Da’s voice springy and buoyant like Magda’s sponge cake as he delights in his physics. I cannot see the chalkboard, dusty and overwrought with his scratchings, but I can envision them in my mind. I close my eyes and I am once more in my familiar bed at home, my walls swelling with equations, some his, some now mine. I lean against the wall of the building, press my cheek against the rough brick, its mortar scraping my skin. I remember the last time I dared to sit in the back row of the lecture hall. No one noticed my presence, until it happened. Da made a mistake on the board, the equation false. I shifted in my seat, wondering if I should correct him; my skirts rustled deafeningly loud in the silence of the lecture hall—the only noise Da’s chalk clacking on the slate. He turned on me, shaking his head the way Magda does when her bread does not rise the way she expects. Da stalked up the shallow steps, the male students murmuring to one another, watching him.
His voice was firm, but muted, as if the words embarrassed him more than they did me. “Sofya, you must not return to the university. When you were an epsilon you could hide under the desks or play in the chalk dust and the rector ignored it, because you were merely a child. But, Sofya, you must realize you are no longer a child.”
I ground my teeth and lowered my head so he could not see the tears filling my eyes. Was that what he thought of my talents, playing with chalk? Was it not I who corrected the errors in his own lecture notes, pasted to my walls? The formulas I stared at for months, filling my dreams until I realized their fundamental flaw—the hand that writ them.
“I am sorry, Sofya, but it must be this way.”
I nodded, ignoring the smirks and sneers of the wool suits behind him—those addle-headed boys who would never be able to correct Da, who would always scribble their maths dutifully without questioning their meaning. Da smiled weakly, but it was too late for such niceties.
A smattering of applause from beyond the door breaks me out of my reverie and I realize I am crying once more. I leave, wondering if I will ever be able to return.
Magda says that narcissus dried and crushed will rejuvenate the spirit. I fall asleep in a pasture, my body cradled in daffodils, steeping myself in their buttery petals. Upon waking, I feel no different and have missed Magda’s special dark bread, her oxtail stew. I sulk past the kitchen, place a spray of flowers on the hearth for the house spirits. As I drift off to sleep, I hear them arguing over something, but I cannot make out their words.
The house spirits worry. They check and recheck the storeroom for flour and rye the way a squirrel digs up a cache, the way I recalculate my proofs. They sense my restlessness, see it in my stodgy dough, my uneven stitches, the blotches in my papers. I beg Da to bring home mathematics texts from the library, but he refuses—the binding is too fragile, the papers too rare. I offer to grade his students’ physics work for him, but he scowls at the insinuation that he is too feeble-minded to understand mathematics. He hoards his papers in his office, comes home without his folio. I consider asking the house spirits to steal books from the university, but they grow increasingly weary of my obsession and more fearful of the outside world. They darken as Da reads from his newspaper about Otto’s engines, cower when I explain how the telegraph works, transmitting words through electrical current. I can do nothing to assuage their fears but leave them a thimble of salt and a few new potatoes behind the stove as an apology. We never speak of such technology again. For their sakes, I am grateful Da has refused to purchase a sewing machine after all—arguing it is more expensive than our stove—though my pinpricked fingertips and Magda’s sore wrists wish for it nonetheless.
Da has invited a visiting professor of botany to dinner. Magda raises an eyebrow at the late addition but says nothing as she pulls out another plate. I imagine abandoning them to their dour guest, seeking freedom in the forest of my functions and fractals—but it is no good. Da’s reputation, if not my own, keeps the servants paid, the wood stove burning. As I help peel potatoes, I think about all that Magda has taught me about plants: which are poisonous, which can be used as a salve, which to burn away bad spirits, which to use for protection. I say nothing to the botanist at dinner.
I watch as they hew the lowest branches from the fir, needles strewn in the snow. The woodsman weeps as he chops, tears flowing like the tree’s oozing sap. I pull on Magda’s elbow as we trudge through the frozen streets. She leads us down an unfamiliar road, careful not to follow the same path as the funeral procession where evil spirits might still lurk.
“What has happened?” I ask, unsure how to pose the question.
“The woodsman’s son has been killed,” she begins, bundling herself deeper in her wool coat. “The fir will protect him in his grave.”
“Killed? Why” I mull this idea in my mind, of a life purposefully taken by another, try to imagine how to rectify murder, how to graph it.
“There was a rebellion,” she begins, skirting around a mound of snow. “There are larger forces in this world than mathematics, Sofya.” Magda’s words are harsh like ice. I do not ask any more questions. We walk home in silence.
In the evening, I place a pinecone behind the stove for the house spirits. As I drift to sleep, I hear them praying, their lilting voices spiraling up to my room. I wonder what they are praying for, wonder if they can feel the woodsman’s son’s presence in the flesh of the pinecone. In the morning, I forget to show them the Fibonacci sequence hidden in its wooden petals.
The botanist has asked to accompany Da to Poznan for the summer retreat. Magda tut-tuts but says nothing. She spends the next week preparing my things for the journey, drying bluebells and scattering their brittle blossoms in the layers of my linens. She tells me they are to keep my clothes fresh on the long journey, but Magda forgets how much she and the house spirits have taught me. I help her pack and wonder what truth she wishes me to find this summer.
We travel to the cemetery today, the day before our journey. Magda is anxious, huffing all the way, her mind an unending list of all that she must do before we leave. But we could not forget this step in our calculations. The house spirits would spit on our foreheads if we had left without speaking to Ma. “What if something should happen? What if you never came back and had never said goodbye?” I think of all the other times I’ve walked here, many times not even knowing what I should do at Ma’s gravestone—but still standing there, a flower offering as if she were a house spirit too and not my mother, whose eyes I have forgotten, who I can no longer smell in Da’s bedroom.
Today Magda brings lemon-colored daylilies to the grave. For motherhood. For easing one’s sorrow. For forgetting.
I hold Magda’s hand, squeezing it in thanks. We begin the walk back into town and I can feel Magda staring at me.
“This trip is different, Sofya. Do you feel it?”
I’m still thinking about the daylilies, the burst of pollen speckling their flesh, wondering if there is a way to calculate the pattern. I do not feel anything different.
“This may be our last summer in Poznan together.”
I count the rows of hay as we pass Gorzow’s field.
“The botanist?” I ask finally, losing count. Magda nods. “Is there any escape?”
“Perhaps you will grow to love one another.” She proposes the hypothesis hesitantly, knowing it is faulty.
Ma was able to escape, I think. I had not realized my life has been plotted out like a graph, linear and predetermined by the variables someone else has selected. Had Ma felt this too—the function forcing her to curve for another? Is replacing life with a zero the only way I may change its course?
The botanist does not know mathematics. He spends the summer drawing ferns, pinecones, and sunflowers. I point out the Fibonacci sequence in the petals, in the curvature of a snail shell. He nods, tries to highlight this in his drawings, spells Fibonacci wrong in the margins. I pocket the shell to bring back to the house spirits as a present. My hat box is full of trinkets for them: leaves from the forest, a stag’s antler, the broken shell of a catbird. Magda tuts, wonders if I’ll ever return home. She forgets that I would never leave my wall equations unattended for too long.
We have returned from Poznan. Magda was right. This trip was different. The botanist visited every day and dined with us most evenings. I had little time to myself to think, the shadow of the botanist, looming over my proofs, Magda’s raised eyebrow darkening my afternoon teas. In the mornings, the party, Professors Beksinski and Dombrovsky, Da, the botanist, Dr. Placzek, and me, would hike, marching across the hills, scaring the fauna with our conjectures. The botanist slowed us down, sketching a different species of wildflower every few kilometers. I plucked a bluebottle and smelled it, remembering Magda’s habit of doing so when she loses patience with me.
“Isn’t the bachelor supposed to wear that?” Prof. Beksinski guffawed.
The botanist, sitting on a rock with his precious sketchbook, blushed, embarrassment spidering up his neck and face.
I dropped the flower, its bloom already fading, and continued up the hill. The rest of the party followed, resuming their conversation.
The house spirits would have liked the bluebottle, I think. I regret not picking more for them.
The botanist has asked Da the question. While they may be fine men, they are, I think, very poor scientists. They attempt an experiment under a faulty premise and will not understand why when they fail.
The house spirits have been quiet since we returned from our retreat. Often they sulk when we go away, but this feels different. They did not accept my treasures for them, leaving the stag’s horn and the shells to gather dust in the kitchen. Magda could not bring herself to sweep them away but bristled each time she saw them. We baked rugelach with honey, left a thimble of mead for the spirits, and were relieved when all the tokens were gone the next morning.
Magda has bought a fine white silk and delicate lace. She waits for the house spirits to bless the fabric, to help her measure and pin the cloth into place. But there is only silence.
“Are they ill?” I ask Magda. She shrugs, tuts, picks up the scissors.
“It is not for us to know.”
A month has passed with no sign of the house spirits. Magda has nearly finished the dress. She makes me try it on daily, tucking a seam here and there, pretending to be surprised when the hem is too long. Magda has sewn all my clothes since I was a baby, since Ma was alive; she does not need me to try on this dress. It is all a performance—a way to entice the house spirits, I think. Or perhaps to prepare me for the inevitable.
I cannot sleep. The weight of the blanket, of my thoughts, suffocate me. The botanist has announced that he has secured a professorship in Germany that he will begin after the wedding. I sit in the dark, staring at my walls: a proof of Ostrogradsky in the corner, Goldbach’s conjecture behind my bureau, Gauss’ lemma above my writing desk. I close my eyes and see them all, know they will still be here when I am gone. I think of the shell I left for the house spirits, the branching antlers of the stag. Trinkets, bribes for their love, for their blessings. I push the blanket off me, kneel next to my bed. I tug at the wallpaper, tearing a swatch of equations off with a flourish. Beneath, a moldering fleur de lis and thistle creep up the wall. I blanch and turn away.
I crawl downstairs, careful not to let the stairs creek, the kitchen door to stutter open. I kiss the equations and tuck them behind the stove for the house spirits. I fall asleep on the kitchen floor, wake up with a sprig of rosemary in my hand before Magda has come to light the fire.
The botanist has brought me myrtle. Magda says I must dry it and braid it in my hair for the wedding. The house spirits hold their noses and scowl at its perfume, hiding in their nooks and crannies until the aroma is dissipated by Magda’s sweet breads. She begins to prepare the bridal feast and I am not allowed to help. I pretend to pack my trunks but dart out the back door when I hear Magda begin to sing to her dough to help it rise.
I count the steps to the university, calculate the angle of the staircase that leads me down into the empty lecture hall. I pick up the chalk, softened from the humidity, the spring rains, and begin to write. The dust cakes my fingers, tickles my lungs as I cover the slate with a new formula—one that has never graced my walls, one that Da could never produce. Hand trembling, I step back, tut absentmindedly like Magda seeing the proof scrawled out, alive, for the first time. I scan for a mistake, a crooked stitch, a faulty step.
“Sofya?” a voice asks timidly from the top of the stair.
I memorize the intonation, chart its wavelength in my mind: a voice I will live with forever, once I turn around.
“Sofya, this is astounding.” The botanist stares at my work as though it is a new species of plant he has discovered, though I know he cannot understand it. He takes out his sketchbook and sits like an eager student in the first row of the classroom. Pencil poised, he looks up at me. “May I?”
“Why?” I ask. I do not know how to explain to him that I can recreate it without looking, that it has lived inside me for years, that I know it better than I know myself.
“So that you might have a copy in our office at the university in Göttingen and continue your work.” He pauses, still admiring the chalky proof blossoming over the board. “Perhaps you might discuss it with some colleagues there, who can understand it better than your father, certainly better than me. It must have taken you hours to write all this. Do you not see that it has grown dark? Magda worried when you did not come down for tea.”
“Our office?” I ask, still staring at the equation, still searching for a mistake.
The botanist smiles and I imagine two parallel lines stretching out to infinity. I nod, and he sets his pencil to the page once more. It is then I see my error but say nothing.
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Shelly Jones (she/they) is a Professor of English at a small college in upstate New York, where she teaches classes in mythology, folklore, and writing. Their speculative work has previously appeared in F&SF, Podcastle, The Future Fire, and elsewhere. Find them on Twitter @shellyjansen or shellyjonesphd.wordpress.com. |
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