NINA OF FEBRUARY THE TWENTY-NINTH The girl who could see lost hours

PART ONE — THE CITY OF HURRIED CLOCKS

The Sweepers steal nothing. People throw it to them.

— A translation of the Sweepers’ first word, its meaning forgotten

Chapter 1 — The Girl of February the Twenty-Ninth

Somewhere, there is a city where everyone consults the clocks. No one looks at them. People glance, rest their eyes, turn on their heels, and hurry off. The city owned ninety-three public clocks — clocks in hotels, clocks in stations, clocks on churches, clocks carved into fountains — and not one of them had ever been contemplated long enough for anyone to watch its second hand come to the end of its turn. It is a strange thing, when you think about it. In a city, you can look at anything: shop windows, clouds, other people’s shoes. But clocks — never. People consult them the way they consult a dictionary, and close them at once.

In that city lived a girl who did look at clocks. Her name was Nina. She was eleven years old, but she had only two thousand six hundred and seventy-two days of life, because she had been born on February the twenty-ninth, in the last minute of the day. Her grandmother used to say that Nina was not like other children: other children had three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and let hundreds of them slip away with each passing year. Nina had two hundred and ninety-two a year, and she kept every one.

You may not know the children of February the twenty-ninth. There are very few of them. They are children who received, at birth, the gift of a day that hardly exists, and who have no choice but to live it completely, since they cannot be given another. A girl born on February the twenty-ninth celebrates her birthday four times less often than the others. So she celebrates it differently: she lives it. It is hard to explain the difference between celebrating a day and living it. To celebrate is to decorate. To live is to step inside.

Nina lived on the top floor of number 9 Bumblebee Street, at her grandmother’s, with rooftops for neighbors and chimneys for gardens. Her grandmother was called Camille. She had hands that smelled of flour and lavender, and a sentence she repeated every morning as she opened the shutters: “Never be ashamed of a day. You never know which one is the last of a series.” Nina did not understand all of this sentence. She loved it the way you love a stone you have picked up: without knowing why, just because it fits in your hand.

Nina’s mother was called Laurène. She no longer lived with them. No one on Bumblebee Street could say exactly where she had gone, or why, or even precisely when. Her grandmother would only say: “Your mother went looking for something she was missing. People do that sometimes. It is not cowardice; it is searching, clumsily done.” And when Nina asked what Laurène was looking for, Camille would gaze out the window for a long time and answer: “Her hours, I think.” Then she would set the teapot back on the stove, because there are questions that come to an end with a cup of hot tea.

Nina went to the school on the square, like all the children of the city. And there, something had puzzled her for years without her being able to name it. The grown-ups, first of all, were in a hurry. Every child in the world knows that. But here, the children were in a hurry too. In a hurry to finish school, in a hurry to finish recess, in a hurry to be grown up, in a hurry to finish playing so as to begin playing something else. No one ever finished anything they were doing, because everyone had already begun, in their head, whatever came next.

There was a word Nina heard a hundred times a day, and it meant nothing at all. That word was after. After recess. After dinner. After the weekend. When I have the time. When it’s all over. Later. The whole city lived in an enormous after — comfortable, upholstered, like a corridor with no door at the far end. Nina sometimes looked for someone’s now, anyone’s, to see what it looked like. She never found it. In that city, the now was an empty apartment that everyone ran through, and in which no one had ever moved in.

There was something else in the city that no one ever noticed, though it had puzzled Nina when she was very small: people threw away a great deal. They threw away packaging, which is understandable. But they also threw away invisible things. They threw away a smile they were about to give and turned into a grimace because they were in a hurry. They threw away a tell-me-about-it that a child was holding out to them, and postponed it until the next day. They threw away waves of the hand, tendernesses, questions left hanging, the urge to dance abandoned in the middle of the crossroads. All of this fell to the ground, without a sound, the way hair falls. And by the end of the day the city lay covered in a fine, silver dust that did not trouble the wind.

The street sweepers of the city came by every evening with their carts. They swept up leaves, petals, papers. But never, not once, did they touch that particular dust. It stayed. It gathered in the corners of crossroads, under benches, at the foot of clocks, and by morning it had disappeared. No one asked how. People do not have time to ask how things disappear. Asking how things disappear takes time. And time, as it happened, in that city, no one knew where it went.

Nina did ask. She had been asking since she was six years old, on the day she lost an hour and found a life. It happened like this: she was waiting for her grandmother under the clock on the square, and she amused herself by watching the second hand make one full turn, from beginning to end, without taking her eyes off it. A whole minute, lived from one end to the other, with nothing but her eyes. When she looked up, her grandmother was there, and the world was sharp and fresh and new, as if washed. Camille looked at her oddly, with an emotion she could not quite hide, and said: “You don’t do that often, do you?” — “Do what?” — “Looking. Living.” Nina did not understand. She understood years later, and it is this understanding that begins this story.

Because there is a thing the people of the city did not know, and you will know it before they do. The hours human beings let fall do not disappear. They do not evaporate. They do not drift away into some cloud of forgetting. Someone picks them up. Every night, silently, patiently, with a gentleness the world perhaps does not deserve, someone gathers up everything people throw away of their time, and carries it elsewhere, to a place no one knows — because no one has ever thought of it as they fell asleep, and that is precisely when you must think of it to find it.

The place is called the Reserve of Lost Hours. It appears on no map, and for good reason: maps are drawn by day, and the Reserve opens only at an hour that is all but missing from the clocks. The people of the city never thought about it, not even in their dreams. Dreams, too, are in a hurry.

And yet, that year, there was a girl of February the twenty-ninth who did think of it. She thought of it at four minutes past four in the morning, standing at her window, bare feet on a cold floor, because she could not sleep, and the night in her room had a curious quality about it: it seemed to be waiting for something.