were some beautiful tall buildings.
Suddenly, four elegant buildings, about 25 stories high, with green roofs appeared and grew at a distance. Stepan utters dreamily, “I wish we could live here!” In that moment, our car stops and Sasha says, “We’ve arrived, and it’s here we are going to live.” By the entry there were some beautiful flowers, a concierge opened the door, and the entry was decorated with marble and mirrors, which were so clean that Stepan, in bewilderment, walked into one of them, mistaking a reflection for a real passage. The elevator did not smell of what it smells in Russia and noiselessly took us to the 8th floor. The apartment had three bedrooms and as many as two bathrooms.
Sasha and our first home in Chile Sasha wanted to impress and astonish us and do
everything in his power for us to like it there. I have to say: he succeeded. He really wanted us to stay with him. He himself liked Chile very much.
It was safe here, especially after Colombia and he was looking forward to a new phase in his life, for which he was preparing and waiting for a long time.
He bought a bike for Stepan, which he dreamt about while in Russia because his old one had been stolen.
He got me a poncho and a llama sweater for Daria, because we both freeze all the time, and it was win-ter in Chile at that time. We would walk along the ocean, watch the two-meters high waves, listen to how they would dumbly break up on the rocks, and how they rolled and foamed on to the sandy beach.
In the night, the ocean would wake us up, when at the tide times the waves rolled on to the coast with a low roaring stretched drumming sound.
Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María
Universidad Santa María Sasha had gotten a job at a technical university,
which was named after its founder Federico Santa María, a big sugar trader and co-owner of Valparaíso port stocks. Not having any heirs, he left his money for the foundation of a technical college to prepare well-educated technicians and engineers for servic-ing the Valparaíso port. I remember, somebody told us, that in his will he wrote that the college should be built in a German style, and the local professors should be allowed to work there not before 20 years after its opening, so that proper order would be in-stated and maintained. I don’t know how true it is,
but the architecture of the university really followed some gothic style. We all called the university simply Santa María.
The main colleague and co-author of Sasha was Rubén Hidalgo. They would talk end-lessly about mathematics. However, Sasha would always find time for us. Sasha was teach-ing us everythteach-ing: how to ride a bus, how to shop in a real supermarket, how to through away household garbage in a plastic bag and not just by pouring out the bucket (as we did in Russia). He was also our first Spanish language teacher. We would go purposefully to
44 CHAPTER 6. CHILE the university, and he would teach us. I remember how the kids would get bored and they would start misbehaving. Sasha suddenly discovered that he didn’t know what to do about it.
Caleta Portales– fish market
On one of those days, we decided to defuse the situation and went to the fishing moleCaleta Portales, which was just in front of the university.
There, there were so many different kinds of fish, crabs, shellfish and something else fished out of the sea. The seals were playing around in the water and the pelicans were strolling or, better said, soaring around watching for some fish cuttings. Sasha asked to fill a bag with fish heads, paying for them as for a good filet, as it seemed to me: everything seemed so cheap. I remember the fish heads were big and triangular, of the fish namedreineta.
We proceeded to feed the seals. One couple of seals swallowed happily the fish heads; though the male would not give the female a single chance to get to the fish, and when the fish was over, went in for a cuddle. It would seem that the satiety was waking some other kind of emotion too. The pelicans were swarming around. Stepan decided to knock out a pelican with a fish head. But this, seemingly not very dexterous, bird elegantly turned around its head with a heavy beak, gently received the food into the open abyss of its beak and started to heavily take off over the water. It remained a mystery to me how it was possible to maintain the equilibrium during the flight, when your balance is shifted by roughly 30% due to the heavy bag under the beak. Even bigger mystery remained: how is it possible to swallow a fish head, which is about four times wider than the diameter of the neck. We were standing there astounded, watching the slow movements of the retreating pelican. It was real wild nature, here, about a hundred meters away form the study halls.
We used to love to go to that mole when we had the opportunity, just to go look around or to eat in the local restaurant. There, we discovered that hake can come in another form than frozen in huge bags and tasteless by definition, but very fresh, with soft meat and nice smell, it’s just that here it is calledmerluza. At first, we tried to translate the names of the local produce; but one time, translating the name of the fishcorvinain a big Spanish-Russian dictionary, we came upon the translation ofcorvinaas ‘fish form the lobe-finned family’.
Since then, we just learned the new word in the language that we had seen it for the first time. In this way, mussels for us arechoritosin Chile andblåskjellin Norway, and scallops areostionesorkamskjell.
After learning some Spanish, I suddenly realized that at the department of Mathematics nobody was taking me seriously and would call me nothing else thanmujer de Alexander – Alexander’s woman. My PhD degree, a dozen scientific publications, the ten years of teaching experience – none of it mattered. One of the lecturers asked me directly: ‘Do you even know how to teach?’ Probably, it was possible to understand them. Sasha was always speaking for me – they didn’t speak much English, and I didn’t speak much Spanish; so I was always dependent on Sasha.
I should give Rubén some credit: he just handed me his course on the Measure the-ory. Only three students had signed up for the course, and they were also quite clever. In this way, after half a year, one could say illegally, I started giving lectures. The students persistently pushed through my Spanish and would help me as much as they could. One of them, Rodrigo Menesis, defended his Master’s thesis with us and up to this day works in the University Santa María. Another student, Álvaro Liendo, successfully defended his
UNIVERSIDAD TÉCNICA FEDERICO SANTA MARÍA 45 Master’s thesis at the Santa María, and then did his PhD in France, and now he’s one of the leading young mathematicians in Chile.
The next semester, I don’t even remember how anymore, but I was offered to do some lectures at the University of Chile in Santiago. So, I had to travel 150 km three times a week.
But, for one thing, I quickly learned Spanish, and secondly, people at Santa María realized:
if she’s invited to give lectures in the University of Santiago, maybe she’s not that bad after all and maybe we could have a use for her as well. Plus, by the end of this third semester I got a grant from the Chilean Research Council, which probably decided everything. I was given a part-time job. By the way, Sasha got a similar grant a year before me. While still in Colombia, knowing he was going to Chile, he wrote a project proposal. And when the news came about him getting the grant, the whole department came through the office that day to congratulate him.
I was always amazed at how easily he wrote the project proposals, filling out endless forms. His proposals were broad and ambitious, grandiose and almost fantastic. We some-times joked between us saying “New Vasiuki”, understanding that a project was written mostly for the bureaucrats and it needed to be sold well. After getting one grant, Sasha would start thinking about the next step. This way, by the end of our stay in Chile, he organized the application to one of the biggest grants that were announced by the Chilean Research Council. To tell the truth, he didn’t get the grant, but the group remained. Some years later, after we had already left Chile, our colleagues got this grant and we were part of the international collaboration of the project.
Together with Sasha at a conference in Chile It was in Chile, where we
started to work together. In Santa María, nobody was working with mathematical analysis or differ-ential geometry. From the be-ginning, Sasha got me sitting in his office, where we worked dur-ing the six years we spent in Chile. Nobody at the department thought it could be any other way. This way, by starting ask-ing each other “do you remember how to…” or “How to calculate…”
and so on, we started discussing mathematics. First, Sasha got me into the Hele-Shaw topic; he had just started working on it and he needed someone to explain it to.
He would tell me all about it and I would try to understand and would ask endless ques-tions. Realizing that he could not explain me something, he would try to get it himself and everything would start over again. In this way, a precise, logical picture would emerge progressively. Later, I got Sasha involved into my interests.
It turned out that I have a stronger logic and more structured way of thinking, while Sasha had an incredible intuition and freedom of imagination, which, as you know, is crucial for creative work. We were quite a good duo, and we worked together a lot, even if we had our own independent topics. In all, we wrote 20 articles together. It is embarrassing to admit, but sometimes we would fight too much about mathematics, and often did it at home during dinnertime. After finishing yet another article, it would seem we would never write another one together; but some time would pass and we would start a new project. Once,
46 CHAPTER 6. CHILE someone asked Daria whether she would want to study mathematics at the University, to which she replied: “It’s enough with two mathematicians in our family.”
I was mostly impressed how Sasha would get excited about a new project and was not afraid to take on new challenges. And if he did not understand something, he would feel that it was so cool. And when he would get and learn something new, he would try to tell everybody about it and explain it to them, because he had understood everything himself.
This had a double effect: the more he would explain, even with mistakes, even in a some-what naïve way, the more he understood himself and moved forward. It was some kind of insatiable hunger for new mathematical horizons.
A tradition of weekly mathematical seminar was established quite quickly at the de-partment. When a question about the day and time was raised, it was decided to have it on Fridays afternoon at 5 p.m. Friday, because the invited speakers could stay for the week end at the coast: after all Valparaíso and Viña del Mar were touristic places. And in the after-noon, because there were no lectures, and we could have dinner together with the speakers after the seminar.
However, the deal with the dinner was not so simple. The restaurants did not open before 8 p.m., but by 6:30 we were already quite hungry and 100% ready to relax. Everything would end up in one of two pubs:Tip y Tap, where they would serve an amazing ceviche or Sicaru, where the beer choice was simply endless. We got to try quite a lot of new things at theTip y Tap, as for example the sea urchin. I remember the first time, when all the Chileans at unison decided to order a sea urchin for us and we saw this jelly-like red mass in a small plate, an eerie suspicion that this thing can not be delicious crawled into our minds. Then, our colleagues, interrupting each other, started to suggest to put some salt on it, some pepper, add some onion, drizzle it with lemon juice, and then, ‘close your eyes, swallow it and enjoy’. I asked myself: if this is so delicious, what is all this ritual for? It was not delicious! But… interesting. And also, we were told, it was incredibly good for the man’s health. With time, we got used to the flavors of the sea and started to enjoy it.
However, the sea urchin is the last thing on the list of sea products that is worth trying to get accustomed to the flavor of the sea delicacies.
Asadoon Sasha’s favorite grill Some times the kids would
join us, feeling at ease with our colleagues and teaching us Span-ish, translating the Chileanisms, which alternated in the emotional speech after just one glass of beer.
I remember, just after arriving to Chile, Sasha tried taking the kids to different restaurants, but they just wished for McDonald’s.
Sasha got upset: how can you pre-fer this dry burger to a nice piece of meat! I tried to calm him down, saying that “the time will cure it”
and you just wait, they will un-derstand what a good restaurant means and, then, we will have to pay much more money. Actually,
the kids didn’t need much time to get disappointed in McDonald’s, put it on the black list and start enjoying thechurrasco,asado, andjardín de mariscos, which was especially good in one of the neighborhood restaurants by the seasideLa picá de Juan Seguraat the coast
UNIVERSIDAD TÉCNICA FEDERICO SANTA MARÍA 47 of Concón.
Sasha himself used to describeasado, this is barbeque or grill, in this way: “Yyou buy a couple of kilos of meat, preferablylomo vetado(a special cut), put it on the grill for a couple of minutes on one side, same time on the other side and serve it with red wine. The juice will be dripping from the inside, it’s tender and melts in your mouth.” In general, we got spoiled by the low prices, the quality and the diversity of restaurants in Chile. I still remember the taste of the Margarita cocktail at the colorful restaurantCuerna vacaand the fajitas were so good that we learned how to make them ourselves and still make them in Norway.
There was also this German restaurantMax und Moritz, where three huge peaceful German Shepherds would lie by the entrance, the beer was served in one liter volume glasses, and where the German owner of the establishment, son of eastern Germany, would seat at each table and drink a glass of beer with the guests. It would seem he knew everybody, but he would not last until the end of the evening, and his young Chilean girlfriend would serve everybody, remembering all the preferences of the regulars. We would celebrate the school events atDiego pizza, where there was an endless menu of all kinds of pizza and alcohol-free drinks.
View from our office window
As I’ve mentioned before, the uni-versity was located by the seaside on a rocky hill, and the windows of our of-fice gave to the edgeless ocean shining in the sun most of the time. When one of us would get tired, we would relax looking at the surface iridescent with light and waves, and recharge our en-ergy. And the passing by pelicans, re-minded us of pterodactyls and would take us to a whole other world.
A couple of month after we ar-rived, a couple of blue whales came to the Valparaíso harbor. When they would come up the coast, all the news-papers and news broadcasts would panic about them throwing themselves out on dry land in an act of suicide. There were so many fantastic suggestions to scare them away from the coast. But the things turned out to be much more romantic than that. The couple had swum into the calm and deep harbor to enjoy each other and to conceive a new generation. This was happening for the first time in fifty years. For a week, we could not break ourselves away from our windows, watching how the whales played with each other, showing either a huge tale or a muscular back over the waterline, coming together or parting and almost disappearing from the view. They were clearly feeling well, and we did too by watching this celebration of love. It would seem that the whole Chile came through the fishing mole Caleta Portalesduring this one week, recording videos and making pictures, and also just watching the bewildering dance of the blue whales.
A week later, during a big storm, an immense rusty barge crashed into theCaleta Por-tales, braking it down to pieces and landing on its ugly rusty side with its front ripped in two due to the crash with the mole. The whole Chile had to make another peregrination voyage to see the man-made miracle this time. It was said that the ship was sailing under some African flag, but the crew was from Ukraine, who being drunk during the storm, didn’t have time to raise the anchor. So the unattended vessel was thrown on the bank, leaving the local fishermen without a working place for a year, while the mole was restored. After that, the show with the ship continued for another couple of months: it had to be towed out
48 CHAPTER 6. CHILE to sea to be sunken. The Chileans had to collect the machinery from all over the country in order to move such a bulk from the shallow waters. They had started up the process several times, provoking endless jokes from the engineers of Santa María, who had a view from their windows of this show as if it was on the palm of their hands. Later, the working mole was restored, and made into a modern, much more sturdy construction.
A crashed barge at Caleta Portales
During the time we worked in Chile, the University Santa María was steadily ranking as number three in its prestige and was a cultural center. For example, all the ensembles perform-ing classical music, who were visitperform-ing Santiago, would, without fail, visit the Aula Magnain Santa María – not a big hall, but with very good acoustics. We tried not to miss any concerts, espe-cially the Christmas and Easter ones, which were distinguished by a special atmosphere. There, we learned that Peter Tchaikovsky is called Pedro and Giselle is called Hiseya. The tradition of classical music in Chile was founded by the Germans, who moved there at the end of the 18th – beginning of the 19th century. In general, Santa María was one of the most beautiful universities that we ever visited with Sasha. All the buildings are kept in one har-monic style, and the campus is filled with flowers, plants and always nicely kept. There was even a swimming pool, with, in my opinion, always cold water, where they would have classes anyway. There was a steady tradition to through into the pool the students who just received their master or engineering degree.
We liked to work at Santa María. Usually, we would teach two courses each semester:
one for the bachelor students and one on the master level. In the last year of us being there, the new university board changed the tactics and decided to convert the elite engineering school to a business-friendly education unit. The admissions to the first year doubled. In the first semester there were 14 parallels with 60-70 people in each, and Sasha was appointed as the coordinator of all the parallels. He assembled a group of people with similar ideas to his, where I was included. We had to come up with a program for lectures literally down to the hour, find the problems for the seminars, chose the exercises for the practical group classes, develop tests every month and the final exams, and there were as many as three of them. All the study groups had to be synchronized, because all the exams were taken on the same day, so everybody had to have gone through all the material included in the test. The other dozen of lecturers were the part-time employees who worked in three or four different places trying to make a living. They were jokingly called professor/taxi driver, because they would finish their class in one university, jump into a taxi and in just 20 minutes would start a lecture in another university. They were teaching up to 50 hours a week, so more than 7 hours a day, including Saturday. Sasha made a web page for the course, where all the exercises, the solutions, all the dates and deadlines were uploaded. By the third week, we found out that the part-time lecturers, obviously, didn’t want to compare their notes written long back and yellow from the time passed with the work rhythm of the parallels. People we starting to fall behind and unsatisfied. The tests were supposed to be graded in a week’s time, so that the students would know their results and could move forward. And when Sasha said in a quite tough manner to one of the women, who had not managed to grade the tests in two weeks, that she didn’t know how to work, he got as an answer that he