His gruff voice made his splendid moustache, which reached his ears, quiver. He got up from his bed with difficulty and seized the coffeepot, muttering in a dialect that he was the last to speak on Anima. With all his handling of archives, the old man lived entirely in the past. Even the periodical he was leafing through dated back at least half a century.
“A mug of coffee, dear girl?” The archivist wasn’t a very sociable man, but whenever he set eyes on Ophelia, as now, those eyes began to sparkle like cider. He’d always had a soft spot for his great-niece, doubtless because, of all the family, she was the one who most resembled him: just as old-fashioned, just as solitary, just as reserved.
Ophelia nodded. She had too much of a lump in her throat to speak right then, right there.
Her great-uncle poured out a steaming cup for each of them. “I was on the phone with your ma yesterday evening,” he chomped into his moustache. “So excited, she was, I couldn’t grasp half of her jabbering. But still, I got the gist: you’re finally taking the plunge, it seems.”
Ophelia confirmed this without saying a word. Her great-uncle promptly knitted his huge brows. “Don’t pull that long face, please. Your mother’s found you a chap, and that’s the end of it.”
He handed her cup to her and sat back heavily on his bed, making every spring creak. “Park yourself down. We need a serious chat, godfather to goddaughter.”
Ophelia pulled a chair over to the bed. She stared at her great-uncle and his magnificent moustache with a sense of unreality. She felt as though, through him, she were watching a page of her life being torn out, right under her nose.
“I can well imagine why you’re eyeballing me like that,” he said, “except that this time the answer’s no. Those sloping shoulders of yours, those gloomy glasses and those sighs of total despair, you can just pack them all away.” He was gesturing with thumb and forefinger, both bristled with white hairs. “There’s those two cousins you’ve already rejected! Granted, they were ugly as pepper mills and gross as chamber pots, but it was the whole family you were insulting with each rejection. And what’s worse, I made myself your accomplice in sabotaging those betrothals.” He sighed into his moustache.
“I know you as if I’d made you. You’re more accommodating than a chest of drawers, never raising your voice, never throwing tantrums, but the minute anyone mentions a husband, you send more sparks flying than an anvil. And yet you’re the right age for it, whether the chap’s your type or not. If you don’t settle down, you’ll end up banished from the family, and that I’m not having.”
Ophelia, her nose in her cup of coffee, decided that it was high time she spoke up. “You’ve got nothing to worry about, uncle. I didn’t come here to ask you to oppose this marriage.” At that moment, the needle of the gramophone got stuck in a scratch. The endless echo of the soprano filled the room: “If I . . . If I . . . If I . . . If I . . . If I . . . ”
The great-uncle didn’t get up to free the needle from its groove. He was too flabbergasted. “What are you babbling to me? You don’t want me to intervene?”
“No. The only favor I’ve come to ask you today is to have access to the archives.”
“My archives?”
“Today.”
“If I . . . If I . . . If I . . . If I . . . ” the record player stuttered on. Fiddling with his moustache, the great-uncle raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You’re not expecting me to plead your case to your mother?”
“It wouldn’t do any good.”
“Nor to bring your feeble father round?”
“I’m going to marry the man that’s been chosen for me. It’s as simple as that.”
The gramophone needle suddenly jumped and then carried on where it had left off, with the soprano proclaiming triumphantly: “If I love you, look out for yourself!”
Ophelia pushed up the glasses on her nose and held her godfather’s gaze without blinking. Her eyes were as brown as his were golden. “Splendid!” said the old man, breathing a sigh of relief. “I must admit, I thought you were incapable of uttering those words. He must have really taken your fancy, that fellow. Spill the beans and tell me who he is!”
Ophelia rose from her chair to clear away their cups. She wanted to rinse them but the sink was already full to the brim with dirty plates. Normally, Ophelia didn’t like housework, but this morning, she unbuttoned her gloves, rolled up her sleeves, and did the washing-up. “You don’t know him,” she said at last. Her muttering was drowned by the sound of running water. The great-uncle stopped the gramophone and went closer to the sink. “I couldn’t hear you, dear girl.” Ophelia turned the tap off for a moment. Her voice was quiet and her diction poor, so she often had to repeat what she’d said.
“You don’t know him.”
“You’re forgetting whom you’re talking to!” sniggered the great-uncle, crossing his arms. “My nose may never be out of my archives, but I know the family tree better than anyone. There’s not one of your most distant cousins, from the valley to the Great Lakes, that I don’t know about.”
“You don’t know him,” insisted Ophelia.
She wiped a plate with her sponge while staring into space. Touching all these dishes without protective gloves had sent her back in time. She could have described, down to the smallest detail, everything her great-uncle had eaten off these plates since he’d first owned them. Usually, being very professional, Ophelia never handled objects belonging to others without her gloves on, but her great-uncle had taught her to read right here, in this flat. She knew each utensil personally, inside out.
“This man isn’t part of the family,” she finally announced. “He’s from the Pole.”
A long silence ensued, broken only by gurgling in the pipes. Ophelia dried her hands with her dress and looked at her godfather over her rectangular glasses. He had suddenly shrunk into himself, as though he had just shouldered another twenty years. Both sides of his moustache had drooped like half-mast flags. “What’s this nonsense?” he whispered in a flat voice.
“I know nothing more,” Ophelia replied gently, “except that, according to Mom, he’s a good match. I don’t know his name, I’ve never seen his face.”
The great-uncle went to fetch his snuff tin from under a pillow, stuffed a pinch of tobacco deep into each nostril, and sneezed into a handkerchief. It was his way of clarifying his thoughts. “There must be some mistake . . . ”
“That’s what I’d like to think, too, dear uncle, but it seems there really isn’t.”
Ophelia dropped a plate and it broke in two in the sink. She handed the pieces to her great-uncle, he pressed them back together, and, instantly, the plate was as good as new. He placed it on the draining board.