Carrie Brown - The Stargazer's Sister

William leans forward over the tub, and then he looks away, blinking.

“We still can’t look at it,” William says. “Amazing that it should be so bright. But in a drawing, I have seen how it occurs — the sun is gradually blackened by the solid body of the moon, passing across the face of the sun.” He looks down at Lina. “Do you understand? The moon is moving between earth and the sun,” he says quietly. “It’s a very rare occurrence. We’re in an excellent place from which to see it. And the weather is perfect, just enough haze. Were the air any clearer, we could not see the eclipse at all.”

The courtyard is where Lina helps her mother scald the sheets and raise their impossible, dripping bulk, where she scrubs the knives with brick dust, where she sweeps and coughs and still there is ash and dirt and sour white splatter from the chickens. In the mornings, the sky boils with smoke from the fires. It is difficult for her to think of it as an excellent place.

Lina feels their father tremble beside her. She knows that sometimes certain kinds of excitement — his Überangst —precede bouts of illness, of headaches and melancholy. On these occasions, he comes home and waves away her mother to stumble upstairs, falling onto the bed and drawing the quilts over his head, shutting himself away. Sometimes the spell lasts only a few hours, but sometimes it is days before he emerges, chastened and wanting sympathy, carrying downstairs the accumulated teacups and soup bowls Lina has brought to his bedside in secret, kneeling beside him and whispering to him where he lies with his head under the bedclothes: Papa, Dietrich has learned to clap his hands. Papa, we have chestnuts.

And then always her mother’s fury and berating follow: she has had to turn away his music students, as well as the insulting concertmaster, who came with scores for Isaac to copy. They have no money. What does he expect her to do, how will she care for all these children?

The sun ceases to exist, her father repeats now. Die Sonnenfinsternis.

“It will not go away completely,” William says. “It is only a partial eclipse.”

An ominous feeling of cold creeps across the back of Lina’s neck and head. It is the same sensation her mother’s gaze gives her when she stares at Lina from across the room, a rage over something building inside her.

Lina gazes across the courtyard, waiting until William tells her they can look at the tub. The cart across the way, their neighbor the apothecary’s dovecote on the high wall, the roof of the stable covered in silver lichen, all have diminished somehow in the strange dim light, moved farther away. Across the courtyard, the bantams are a rusty blur, cowering together under the bench outside the door. A little light blinks forth at her from one bird’s eye and then goes out.

A pale kind of darkness has fallen, but it is not like a real night. Real night comes familiarly, by degrees of color in the sky as the sun falls, fire at the horizon and at the top of the wall, bursting over the rooftops and touching everything as it goes, shadows of buildings and trees and the broom handle stretching across the ground, even her own shadow like the silhouette of a giant.

This night is sunken, colorless, unfamiliar…twilight in the day.

“Now,” William says, and they gather around the tub. “It is almost ninety percent covered.” In the tub, the round sun has been pared away. Now it is only a thin, fragile rim of glowing light.

“Don’t look up at it directly, either,” William says suddenly. “It will burn your eyes.”

Lina freezes, staring instead at the bricks of the courtyard floor.

If she does not look up, there is no reason to be afraid, she thinks. In fact, it is strange and thrilling, this transformed world, this eerie light, just as the earthquake was thrilling, even as it was terrifying. She risks a glance about her again, keeping her gaze low. She can still see the courtyard’s walls, but as if through smoke. Everything seems less defined and clear, the broom and the ax and the hatchet. Even their house with their mother and Hilda in it.

And the dimness has spread over everything that lies beyond the courtyard, too: Hanover’s narrow streets and squares, the statue of Victory restored atop her pedestal in the esplanade, the river and ditches and fields and black woods beyond, the castle on its hilltop. If she could clamber up onto the roof of the stable, what would she see? A strange world, half-lit.

But it does not last. William makes them look away again, tells them that the sun will return in the tub by swift degrees.

In minutes the ordinary day is restored.

Sound rises up from the streets. Church bells in the brick steeples begin to ring, just as they did after the earthquake. Outside the gate Lina hears the sound of children’s laughter and shouting, their running feet. There is a feeling that they all have been spared a terrible fate. Yet she is sad that the eclipse is over. Pigs shove their snouts under the gate as they are herded past.

William steps away from the tub.

Everything is now as it had been before.

Jacob manages to give her a hard pinch as he goes away.

How long the restored day ahead seems to her now. Across the courtyard the rooster crows and keeps on crowing.

—

LATER THAT EVENING, when William leaves the house, she steals after him and finds him again in his accustomed place, seated on the bench in the courtyard. He is gazing up at the stars, but when he sees her, he beckons to her and wraps her up inside his cloak.

In Finland, he tells her, they call the Milky Way Linnunrata, the Birds’ Way, where the spirits of everything that dies soar up and throng the road to heaven.

She looks up at the sky with him. She cannot make her mind encompass what lies above their heads, beyond the scrim of sour-smelling smoke that hangs over Hanover, especially when the weather is cold and damp. Yet she feels a pull toward the dark distance and the stars that she knows William feels, too. She wants to think about it. How deep is the sky, how far and how wide? How many stars? Do other people like themselves stand on their own planets and gaze out into the glittering distance? William says so. But how is it that they are all held aloft, suspended in these fixed orbits? There are things moving out there, she knows from William, spiraling planets, strange winds bulging and shifting, darting stars that cross the near sky, falling comets…but from where? And to where?

William has shown her that if she throws a pebble into the air, it will reach its natural apex in midair and fall back to earth. She knows as well that the mathematical formula by which the rise and fall of objects may be predicted comes from the application of Newton’s Laws of Motion; William has shown her the equations. Yet still she struggles: how exactly is it that the earth and moon and sun do not fall? What is gravity? And if the moon can pass between the earth and the sun, what is to prevent them from colliding one day?

Sometimes she stands in the orchard and closes her eyes and tries to feel gravity, holding out her hands, palms up. Sometimes she thinks she does feel it, an invisible weighted ball filling her hands. But more often there is nothing, and her hands are simply empty.

Every year it seems to Lina that winter lasts longer. Snow falls for days at a time, and the streets below the castle are captured in a frozen hush. Few people venture into the icy streets. Firelight and candlelight and lantern light glow in the windows throughout the gray days that are almost as dark as night.