She imagines it, the two of them side by side at the telescope on one of Silva’s terraces.
She cannot explain exactly why she accepted Silva’s invitation, she who has hardly gone anywhere in her life.
It was his description of the sun, she thinks. The light.
—
SHE WORKS ALL DAY, every day. From time to time she goes to stand on the terrace outside her workroom, to rest with her face upturned to the sun. Sometimes she spies Silva on the terraces below, moving among his pots of flowers, among them bougainvillea, he had told her one morning at breakfast, which after a while they had begun to take together. He had stood up and plucked a blossom, bringing it to her.
He is seventy-one, he tells her, and he sees patients now only three days a week. Mostly he confines his practice to children; it is a great joy to him to help effect a cure for a child, for then there is a double happiness.
“Both parent and baby smile,” he says, smiling himself.
Under the table, she folds her hands over her belly.
“Your children?” she asks.
“Alas,” he says. “There were none.”
—
THAT EVENING, after their meal is concluded, he sends away the servants.
He stands to pour more wine for her.
She wears her hair in the old way, braids wound tightly around her head.
He fills her glass and then puts the bottle on the table. He does not return to his chair. He looks down at her.
“May I?” he says.
Her hair has not so much turned gray as it has silvered. The touch of his hands as he unpins and loosens the braids, his fingers as he spreads the strands, is gentle.
She closes her eyes. She does not know where to look. She has never been touched in such an intimate way, not since her mother’s diffident hands combed her hair and braided it when she was a child.
“My wife,” Silva says, “liked me to brush her hair. She suffered from headaches. It was a therapy of sorts.”
Lina finds it difficult to speak.
“I, too, have headaches,” she says. “Since I was a child.”
“I thought so,” he says. “In certain lines on the face, one can see the headache. I do not offend you?”
Lina moves her head a little — no, no offense — but she does not want him to stop. The feeling of his hands…
“You lost her,” she says finally. “Your wife.”
“Many years ago,” he says. “She died when she was quite young. I have been alone for—”
When he stops, she turns to look up at him.
“A very long time,” he says.
—
THE SILK CANOPY ABOVE her bed with its rainbow tassels ripples in the night breeze from the open windows. She smells oranges, lavender, the ocean’s salt, the unfamiliar, strongly herbal scent of the man lying quietly beside her. From somewhere distant in the villa she hears a young woman’s laughter. Outside the window, stars and more stars.
She whispers, “The servants will not come?”
“They will not,” Silva says.
“You are sure?”
“Absolutamente.”
She shuts her eyes.
He blows out the candle and holds her against him. His skin is warm and soft. He is trembling, too.
—
“THANK YOU,” he says later into her neck, and she can feel that his cheek is wet against hers, as hers is wet against his, though they are both laughing a little, too.
“We are not too old!” she says. “I had thought—”
“No, no. The body—” He touches her face. “Amazing what the body can do.”
Later still, when he is laughing again, she teases: “It is the custom in the great city of Lisbon to greet lady visitors in this fashion?”
“No custom,” he says. “Only my good luck.”
She turns her face to his shoulder.
“You know,” she says. “My first.”
EIGHTEEN Dark
Two years after her arrival in Lisbon, Lina and Silva make a trip to Hanover. Silva suffers from gout, and he is afraid that if they wait longer, he will be unable to accompany her.
“You want to go,” he says, as they make their plans. “You are sure.”
“I can’t explain it,” she says.
What she feels is irrational, she knows. It is that William is there, in some way, and also that some lost part of her is there, too, drifting. Untethered. More and more, as she tries to reconstruct William’s life, her life, it is her memories of her childhood that feel most clear to her.
She wants to go back, she tells Silva finally, to put things to rest for herself — that is how she says it, for she cannot think how else to describe what she feels — and she means somehow that she feels in Hanover she can close something, a window left open, a door.
She wants, too, to banish the shadow of her old hurt, to put it away forever.
Her mother. She thinks of her unhappy mother. How to resolve that? There is no resolving it. It is over, unfinished forever.
But she remembers tossing her childish collection of nuts and feathers and pebbles into the river on the afternoon of Margaretta’s funeral. She wants to stand in those places again as the woman she is today.
Once she thought she would die of despair, but after all she has survived. She has outlived, in fact, her sister and all her brothers except Leonard. After William’s death she wrote to Leonard and Dietrich, who were then still alive. They sent condolences by reply, mentioning, too, that Jacob had again disappeared, his whereabouts a mystery. It is possible, she thinks, that Jacob is still alive, somewhere. The thought of him abroad in the world, still able to inflict torments and injury, is not a comforting one, though by now he surely would be too old to do anyone any harm.
Her sister’s children and Alexander’s and Dietrich’s sons are grown, all with young families of their own. Leonard and his wife are shy as strangers with Lina, yet they are hospitable to Lina and Silva, whom Lina introduces as her great friend and as a friend of William’s as well.
From Leonard, Lina and Silva learn that Hilda is still alive. Considered too old for work, she is accommodated in a corner of the kitchen of the Herschel relatives who run the vineyard where her brothers labored for so many years.
One afternoon Lina and Silva hire a carriage to take them to the vineyard. When Lina steps into the doorway of the kitchen, she has to reach for the wall to steady herself; Hilda is slumped in a chair in the corner, the goiter on her neck grown so large that she must hold her head at a savage tilt, her ear nearly touching her shoulder.
When Lina wakes her, Hilda startles, eyes rolling, and then cries and cries.
Silva believes Hilda too old and feeble to withstand surgery to remove the goiter. Instead, they see her settled as comfortably as possible at the convent outside of Hanover. A sister of the order comes and admires Hilda’s fine friends, which pleases Hilda. She smiles — toothless, eyes watering — and she reaches out her hands to Lina and Silva.
Silva speaks to a sister and makes particular arrangements for Hilda’s care, compresses for her neck.
In the cold, echoing corridor outside the dormitory after they have left Hilda, Lina puts her face in her hands.
Silva takes her in his arms. “She is all right,” he says. “It does not pain her, Lina. Only it is uncomfortable, perhaps, and the compresses will help, the kindness.”
She remembers William smiling at her on the day of their departure from Hanover so many years ago, telling her to hurry. She remembers the money he gave to their uncle for Hilda’s care.
She is glad that Hilda’s life has not been unhappy. William had once read aloud to Lina a letter from Alexander in which he related that their uncle always gave Hilda a glass of wine at night, over which she smacked her lips loudly, making them all laugh.