The Mathematician’s Shiva by Stuart Rojstaczer

weekends.
    When I got a call on my cell, I heard the sadness in her voice, the same sadness I felt. “Is Bruce with you?” I asked.
    “He’ll be here later tonight,” Anna said.
    “It’s good. I need you both here. It would be too hard without you,” I said, lapsing into Russian, something I rarely do on my own.

CHAPTER 9
In My Room
    W hen a family sits shiva, you have to do some rudimentary things to prepare the house. You cover mirrors, so as not to look at your dreadful personage. You cover photos, too. Why should anyone be reminded of any events of the past? You do that enough in your head without visual cues. I think this rule should apply more widely. Add bookcases to the list. Why would I want to be reminded of the books I read as a child in my mother’s house?
    I took over my old room, mercifully absent of anything from my childhood. There was a picture of my mother and my grandfather on a desk. That was it for memories. Those two were now gone. How many people were left who remembered them together? Me and maybe a dozen others. In another thirty years, the number would be zero.
    I dragged an air mattress up the stairs that Uncle Shlomo managed to borrow from someone, blew it up, and put it dead center in the room. A week here would be fine, I thought, as I looked out through the lace curtains to the icy backyard and the park beyond. Bruce took over my mother’s bedroom. Anna was supposed to be in there, but Bruce protested that he was not going to sleep in the sunroom because it housed a “dead person’s bed.”
    “My mother died in the hospital, not here,” I said.
    “It’s a sickbed. What’s the difference?”
    “You can’t contract cancer from a bed, Bruce.”
    “You a physician all of a sudden?”
    Bruce was by far the most American of us, the only one who had actually been born in this cherished land. In the world of Los Angeles, no one would guess that he was related to people like us. His cultural divorce—ultimately superficial—took place when he went to college. When he came back home from Williams his first year, he talked like a Boston Brahmin. After his junior year in Italy, he took on an Italian accent that he kept well into his mid-twenties. But in Madison, he tended to regress. This town was not good for him. I knew this. Even his father knew this. When Shlomo, with whom Bruce had long reconciled after some very tempestuous teen years, invited him to stay at his house—a faux-palatial estate with Ionic columns, marble floors, and a couple of gilt statues of Roman women in various classical poses—he knew what the answer would be. Anna, however, was far less patient. “You’re being a big baby,” she said, and reluctantly swapped rooms with Bruce.
    My room had once been my haven. I would come home from Chicago—where I was living my ironic life of religious instruction mixed with a nascent atheism and a lust for the daughter of a delightful and naïve couple—and spend hours in my room alone. I’d read novels and philosophy and write thoughts that at the time seemed profound. When I read these heartfelt musings now they seem ridiculously morose and infantile.
    No one seemed to be worried about—or maybe no one noticed—my descent into teenage narcissism except my grandfather, for whom we had made an expansive room out of the attic. Grandpa Aaron was a pragmatic man. He was not a poker player, a bridge player, or a chess player. He liked to read the news. He read
Barron’s
from cover to cover. In a home full of distracted people, he made up for us all. He was our chief financial officer and invested my parents’ money well. My grandfather opened the door of my room one day without knocking—privacy was nothing my family believed in—and maybe if I had been reading Gorki or Flaubert or Turgenev, he would have just shrugged. But he saw the name on the cover of the book hiding my face and erupted.
    “Kafka! What goddamn sixteen-year-old boy reads Kafka? Out!”
    “What