Page 99 of A Thousand Painted Hours

“Thank you.” He tested it with his good arm. Then: “Will you sleep down here? Next to me?”

I kept my face natural. “Of course.”

He must have sensed my turmoil, for he said, “No, no. I’ll be all right.”

I knelt, pressed a hand to his shoulder. “I don’t mind.”

At last he met my eyes. For one long moment, we swam together through all the selves we had been, and I reached for him, trying to bring him back, but he looked away. “Thank you.”

I had to finish evening tasks and my own ablutions. By the time I came back down, wearing a voluminous and modest nightgown, he was very sleepy. I turned the lamp off and settled beside him but not so close we touched.

To my surprise, he took my arm and looped it across his belly. “Is this all right?”

“Yes,” I whispered, and pressed my forehead against his shoulder. His belly was warm beneath my forearm, and the precious movements of his breath pressed upward, let go. In the silence, touching him, I closed my eyes, and the long day pulled me into sleep.

A simple domestic routine sprang up over the next few weeks. The vegetable garden I’d planted in the spring needed weeding and tying and picking off slugs from whatever they were feasting on each day. I foundsome young hens, and Michael helped me patch the chicken coop to protect them from foxes.

There was the cooking. I did a great deal of it myself, but in truth, the skills I had learned to feed myself in art school were hardly equal to the needs of preparing healthy meals every day, and I did want to feed Tanveer well for the sake of healing.

I had resisted a servant in the house, but finally allowed Mrs. Newsom from the library to send her daughter, Polly, to help with kitchen and food tasks twice a week.

Michael helped with the heavy chores in the garden, moving and hauling, while I pulled weeds and tied up beans and harvested peas and lettuces until they gave out, then took pleasure in tomatoes and summer squashes. I lost the cucumbers to a pest, and the corn never thrived, which Michael blamed on the damp spring.

The unexpected delight was my mother’s cutting garden. Much of it had been there for generations, and I remembered her making bouquets and filling vases. I followed suit, cutting red hollyhocks to pair with white daisies, or fluttery cosmos with sturdy white daisies, sprays of blue delphinium and orange calendula, whose petals shimmered with light. I painted vase after vase in a sunny window in the kitchen, playing with color, shape, light, in a way that felt freer than anything I’d ever done since childhood. I marveled at the petals, the different shapes and pistils and stems.

Of all my tasks, the ones I minded least were helping Tanveer. Until he could lift his arms and walk easily on his own, he relied on my help to wash each day, to bind his hair in the morning, and take it down to brush it at night, to once a week be helped into a bath where he could soak and heal his sore limbs.

My physical body performed these tasks briskly, preserving his dignity and privacy as much as I was able. It mortified him to be so reliant. I often kept up a soft little patter of words, telling him about the garden or the birds I’d seen on a walk, or the weather, which was mild and ridiculously beautiful. The words provided a screen to protect both of us.

Even as my physical self acted efficiently and more adroitly, a ghostly version of me bent to his head and kissed his crown, stroked his shoulder with comfort, whispered kindness and love in his ear. My spirit self tried to coax his soul out of hiding, so it could be tended as well, but it remained hidden.

No matter his ills or how I wished he would talk more freely, I relished the luxury of time I had in his company. I was grateful that he’d come into my care.

And each day, my love for him grew. How could it not?

Slowly, he grew more mobile, graduating from spending most days in the chair in the sitting room to a chair I set out in the garden. In the mornings, we ate eggs and bread, which Polly brought to me from the bakery every third day. Afterward, I turned to my chores and he turned to reading, one book after another from the overflowing shelves in the library, where he’d sit in my father’s leather chair, facing the open French doors. He read H. G. Wells and Henry James, and Dickens, but never made much commentary. It was as if he used the books to disappear. I’d done the same when I’d first arrived from London.

We spoke a little, here and there, about the weather and the new harvest I brought in. When the hens began laying, he enjoyed collecting the eggs. Topaz had brought home a little tuxedo cat, who had her kittens in the henhouse, teaching the kittens they might be chickens, and it charmed him entirely.

Every evening, we ate by the fire and read our separate books.

And at bedtime, I stretched out beside him like a sister, and he took my arm or my hand, and I nestled against his side, and we slept. It gave him comfort to have me there.

Of course I felt desire at times, when I awakened at night especially to discover he had enveloped me in his embrace, holding me so close tohis body that his breath whispered over my ear, when the scent of him filled me with dizzy hunger.

But what I longed for most was his voice, his thoughts. I had never been so long deprived of them. I feared his silence made his suffering worse, like a boil that infects the soul. He had nightmares in which he cried out in despair, shouting until he awakened himself, and could not settle again for hours after.

One morning, after such a night, I rose long before he was awake. He lay on the pallet asleep, his hair fallen out of its knot to spill over his shoulders. His beard had filled in again after the damage of the battlefield, making it thick and glossy, a man’s beard, not a boy’s. A shaft of light slanted over him, touching his neck, and his long beautiful hands. Looking at him, sleeping there, I was stricken by such a sense of love that I nearly could not breathe.

Sitting at the little desk, I took out a sheet of paper and began to write.

July 27, 1917

Herewich

[In Urdu]

Dear Tanveer,