The Woman Who Stirred the Hours

More about The Woman Who Stirred the Hours

Winter had put its face against her window and was waiting to be invited in.

She wore a white knitted sweater. The cables running down it reminded me of roads that had decided to stay home.

There were little gears in her dark hair, two brass wheels above her temple, and a watch that appeared to have lost interest in the hour. I wondered whether she wound her hair before bed.

On the table stood an engraved cezve. She stirred the coffee with a long spoon. Steam rose past her face without asking her to explain anything.

I had come prepared to explain everything.

“You’re becoming Albrecht Dürer,” I said.

“I’m making coffee.”

Botanical drawings covered the table. Each flower had been taken seriously down to its smallest root. A little painted cup stood on a saucer beside her hand, looking much better suited to the afternoon than I was.

“When people say Dürer, they always mean Melencolia. That angel, those tools, the magic square. Everything adding up to thirty-four.”

She lifted the spoon.

“What does thirty-four have to do with melancholy?” I asked.

“How old were you when you first noticed your back?”

I thought about that.

Outside, the buildings had faded into the white weather. No cathedral was visible. This did not prevent me from bringing one into the conversation.

“The square at the Sagrada Família adds up to thirty-three. I used to blame Gaudí for that. Apparently I was blaming the wrong man.”

“Does he know?”

“He died.”

“Then perhaps let him rest.”

I told her about the angular figures on the Passion façade, those severe stone people who looked as though they had arrived from another planet to make the Crucifixion worse.

She listened while watching the coffee.

A pointed brass weight hung from a chain beside the window. Above it was a round piece of clockwork, delicate as a flower somebody had taught to count.

It was not swinging.

“Is that your pendulum?”

“It belongs to whoever needs the time.”

“What time does it say?”

“Wait.”

The coffee rose in the narrow neck of the pot. She lifted it from the heat before it could escape.

There are people who can do this. I have spent much of my life discovering the exact moment after it should have been done.

She filled the little cup.

Its painted figures disappeared beneath her fingers as she handed it to me. The cup was warm in a way my ideas had never managed.

“Maybe thirty-four is just a place where all the numbers agree to meet,” I said.

She put the spoon down.

“Drink before they leave.”

I drank. The coffee was dark and strong. Somewhere at the bottom, the grounds were arranging themselves into a country that would refuse my visa.

For a while we watched the window.

The pendulum pointed toward the table, where a drawn flower lay beside an actual dried leaf.

Neither one was moving.

For once, I decided not to mention it.

That was my first useful contribution to the afternoon.