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this unpredictable world. Hours would pass. There was my hunger, there were my thoughts, and if I thought hard enough, I could, moment by moment, forget my hunger. I was beginning to expand these patternless staircases into three dimensions, instead of one, spiraling upward—which is actually a trivial exercise—when my father was arrested as a capitalist for his trading. Two days later we were in a cattle car, bound for somewhere beyond Kotlas.
    It was on that train that I began to change as a person. I started to be an adult. I had no choice. There was the light barely coming in from the slits between the boards, the cold at night. Everything was working to dull my senses, to make even the most mundane thought difficult to create. You tried to keep warm, huddling together with your family. There was one bucket in a corner where you had to do your business. At stops along the way, someone would throw the mess out and it would fill again on the next leg of our journey. The stench mixed with the vapors of people’s faint breaths. The first time I had to go, my father walked with me to that bucket, trying to give me just the most meager amount of privacy, and I felt so grateful to him. He was a small man, graying and balding at an early age, but I could feel his strength. I knew he would take care of me no matter what.
    Our life from now on would be hell. Of this I was certain. My mother was already showing signs that she would not be able to find the will to live through this ordeal. She would separate from us two, her head down, and it was as if something as involuntary as breathing was already becoming too difficult for her.
    My father and I didn’t talk much on this journey. Our conversations consisted of terse sentences, and were confined to the moments when we needed something. No one talked. What was there to say?
    But at a stop in the Urals, I don’t know where, we did talk. Someone randomly was given one loaf of bread and a jug of water for all thirty of us to share. The mood was tense. When would we, if ever, get more food? The car door was open, and I whispered to my father that we should just run, that it couldn’t be worse than what was going to happen to us if we stayed on the train. He said, “No, Rachela. Look outside, what do you see?” I looked and saw nothing but stunted trees.
    “No, look more carefully. There’s a bear,” he said and pointed into the distance.
    “I see it, Father, yes.”
    “We see one. But there are many. They are hungry, hungrier than us. And they are waiting here for one reason, for someone to do just as you suggest.”
    “They would eat us, Father?”
    “Yes, that bear. He is waiting to eat us. We are better off staying put. As bad as our life will be, we’ll have a place to live. There will be bears there, too. But we can shut the door and keep them out.”
    I looked outside. The bear was still in the distance. He was emaciated. He would eat us for certain, I thought. Then the door shut and we were on our way to Vorkuta.

CHAPTER 5
Impossible Problems
    K önigsberg was not only the birthplace of my childhood “buddy” Leonhardt Euler but, as fortune would have it, also was home to one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, David Hilbert. Whether he, like little Leo, avoided crossing bridges twice is unknown. Probably not. Hilbert was a thoroughly purposeful man who perhaps, even as a child, would frown upon such a frivolous use of the mind. My father, certainly, never introduced Hilbert during his lessons to me. Even he wasn’t inclined to dwell on killjoys. But he should have made an exception for Hilbert. My father knew, after all, that my mother had spent many years working on two of Hilbert’s unsolved problems, one of them being the monstrously difficult Hilbert’s sixth.
    Hilbert would spend his entire career at the University of Göttingen. Hilbert’s gift consisted not only of the ability to solve immensely difficult problems, but also the