The classroom was almost as bright as the squash court. To see Ivan standing in front of a blackboard was somehow terribly embarrassing. And yet, you were supposed to look at him—that’s why he was there. He looked so tall and almost puppetlike as he paced back and forth, wrote on the board, and flung out his arm to point at what he had written. His shirt had come untucked at the side. He was working really hard. He used the word “suffer” three times. I couldn’t remember any other instructor mentioning suffering even once all year.
I looked around the room at the other students. Ira was wearing glasses and looking straight ahead. Two guys in puffy jackets and giant sneakers were slouched all the way down in their seats, moving chairs around with their feet. A girl with a black miniskirt, bright red lipstick, and messy hair was nodding, a smile fixed on her face.
Ivan was talking about closed sets, open sets, odd numbers, even numbers, and days of the week. There were points that were really close to closed sets, there were points closest to the closed set. There was a kind of set that was open and closed at the same time. There was a proof that said there was a set such that it didn’t contain certain of its own elements.
“I’m a really bad artist,” Ivan said, drawing a picture of a house. He gave the house a chimney, and drew smoke coming out of the chimney. The smoke looked like barbed wire. He was drawing so much smoke! A big cloud, big as the whole house. What was going on in there?
Ivan drew a circle around the house. “The house is inside the world,” he said. “You can be inside the house or outside the house, but you can’t leave the world.”
“Is there smoke in the house? If it’s not suffocating, I will stay indoors; if it proves too much, I’ll leave. Always remember—the door is open.” That’s what Epictetus said about suicide.
Next to the house, Ivan drew a stick figure. The head was level with the chimney. In Turkish, if you said, “her head hasn’t reached the chimney yet,” it meant she was still young enough to get married.
“Is he outside or inside?” said Ivan. “You see, he’s outside the house, but inside the world.”
At the end of class, I left immediately, before the clock finished striking ten. Inside the world, yes—but at least outside that room!
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February rolled around. The philosophy professor’s unwavering concern for Martians came to strike me as eccentric, even troubling. For the benefit of the Martians, we spent hours trying to put things like metaphor and malapropism into logic notation. Under what conditions would it be true that “Kenji placed a flag on the pinochle of Mt. Fuji”? (None! None! Under no conditions!)
It turned out that the theory of meaning that would work best for the Martians was a “theory of truth” that gave the truth conditions for every sentence. The solution would look like a series of propositions having the form, “‘Snow is white’ is true iff snow is white.” The professor wrote this sentence on the board during nearly every class. Outside the window, snow piled deeper and deeper.
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In Russian class, nobody cared about truth conditions. We all said, “I have five brothers.”
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I dreamed that Ivan said to identify a point that was really close to the set from Tuesday to Friday. To get the right answer, you had to have a fake Rolex, where the second hand ticked, unlike on a real Rolex, where it swept. On a fake Rolex, the answer was “23:59:59 on Sapir,” because Sapir was the word for Monday, at least in the first two weeks of the month; in the latter two weeks, the first weekday was called “Whorf.” It was important not to regard “Sapir” and “Whorf” as just two synonyms for Monday, because a day’s placement within a month affected its essence.
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Dear Selin, Ivan wrote.
Would you trade wine and cheese for vodka and pickles? Why does a Greek hero have to fight his fate? Are dice a lethal weapon? Is there any way to escape the triviality-dungeon of conversations? Why did you stop coming to math?
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I wrote to Ivan about my dream. He replied that if I gave math a chance, I would see that it was a small and private world: just you and the reasons—no masculine bullies, with their calendars and dictionaries. I remembered then the Russian words for calendar and dictionary, the way they looked feminine but were actually masculine, and I thought he was right: that was what my dream had been about.
The thing with the Rolexes is amazing, amazing, Ivan wrote. Light, he said, seemed to sweep, but quantum theory said it ticked. Waves were the combination of sweeping and ticking. Could true sweeping ever happen on this Earth of ours? Maybe one could do sweeping math, or sweeping sex. Sweeping was beautiful, but powerless. Energy came from ticking—the capacity for rapid change. Immortality was sweeping. Lives coming and going, generations, years, minutes, seconds: all are on the fake Rolex.
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On Valentine’s Day, Hannah forwarded me a chain email: Forward this to five people, or your heart will be broken in the next twenty-four hours. It didn’t promise anything good if you did forward it—just that if you didn’t, your heart would be broken. This has been proven to work. 300 happy couples have broken up within twenty-four hours of deleting this message. What kind of person would write a letter like that?
I went to dinner at the cafeteria with Ralph. It was fajita night. In line, I made up a poem about decision making. “Your choice in tortilla, be it corn, wheat, or flour, / Can alter the wind, fifty-two miles per hour.” There were boxes of “conversation hearts” everywhere, with their ominous gnomic sayings. ASK ME, NO WAY, I DO, WHO ME? Later, I was eating carrot sticks and Ralph said I reminded him of a horse.
“Are you mad at me for something?” I asked.
“No, why would you say that?” Ralph said.
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Ivan wrote to me about clowns. He said that we had forgotten the clowns, who now performed only in prisons and insane asylums. The implication was that this was a bad thing.
I wrote to Ivan about a movie I’d seen in Spanish class, about an old man whose friends all rode around town in motorized wheelchairs. The old man dreamed of becoming a paralytic, so he too could ride in a wheelchair. There were a lot of farm animals roaming in the streets, representing the chaos of the franquista period.
Ivan stopped coming to Russian class. He took longer each time to write back to me. One day at four in the morning he sent a really long message about alcoholism and vertigo. I found it in the student center with Svetlana.
“Who wrote you the monster email?” she asked, looking over my shoulder.
“Nobody,” I said, and closed the message. But she had seen his name. She said Ivan’s last name was an anagram for one of the Serbo-Croatian words for the devil: “You know, like vrag, the Enemy.” I was mad and said that “Svetlana” had “Satan” in it, too.