Germany

Germany is both the setting of Marina’s chronic hospitalization and, after Adele’s death, the place where Marco begins to rebuild a relationship with his former wife. The visits to her clinic, undertaken with their granddaughter Miraijin, make Germany the practical ground on which grief becomes a renewed, if altered, family connection.

The clinic and Marina’s illness

Marina is hospitalized in a private facility in Germany, described as a kind of luxury psychiatric clinic. Her condition has become chronic. The clinic is not merely a temporary backdrop to a crisis: it is where Marina continues to live while her illness persists, and where the people around her must reckon with the long duration of that condition.

A conversation about Marina’s circumstances brings the clinic into view through practical questions: whether she is still in Germany, what kind of place she occupies, and who pays for it. The tuition is covered by Adele’s father, the pilot. Greta, Adele’s sister, is also part of the situation, and the family recognizes that she too must be told of Adele’s death. The news threatens to create another painful problem because Greta and Marina had lately begun to grow close.

Marina’s history in Germany is not wholly detached from her family. In recent years Adele had taken her young daughter Miraijin along when visiting Marina in the summer. Those visits gave Marina an ongoing connection to her granddaughter, even while her hospitalization separated her from ordinary family life.

Adele’s death and the journey to Germany

When Adele dies, Marina has not yet been told. Her former psychoanalyst, Dr. Carradori, takes responsibility for bringing the news to her, traveling to the clinic in Upper Bavaria. The task is especially difficult because Marina’s illness has included an apparent indifference to stimuli; the tragedy must reach someone whose condition has made response itself uncertain.

The journey to Germany becomes the first of two decisive gestures by Dr. Carradori in the aftermath of Adele’s death. He not only informs Marina but also recovers the trust he had enjoyed as her psychoanalyst fifteen years earlier. His intervention moves her and helps establish a response grounded in mutual pity rather than letting the survivors’ other feelings dominate. Through this encounter, Marco and Marina find a relationship that had disappeared after their separation.

Visits with Miraijin and Greta

In Adele’s name, Marco and Marina begin seeing one another again. Marco periodically travels to Germany with Miraijin and takes her to the clinic. He stays with Marina and Greta in Marina’s room or in the garden; sometimes he takes them all for walks in a nearby park. These repeated visits make the clinic a shared family space, not simply the site of Marina’s confinement.

Miraijin’s presence has particular importance because Marina had begun to benefit from meeting her granddaughter. Adele had noticed that Marina seemed to improve, and had decided that, starting at Christmas, she would bring the child more often. She had even asked Marco to accompany her to Germany with Miraijin, and he had agreed. Adele’s death leaves Marco facing the visit without her, and the painful obligation of telling Marina what happened. The journeys he later makes with the child continue the connection Adele had been trying to strengthen.

The visits also include Greta, whose growing closeness with Marina makes Adele’s death difficult to disclose to her as well. Germany thus gathers several relationships affected by the loss: Marina’s bond with her granddaughter, her renewed contact with Marco, and her developing connection with her other daughter. The clinic’s rooms, garden, and nearby park provide the settings for this reconstituted family contact.

A changed relationship and the work of mourning

Marco no longer feels hostility toward Marina. What remains is pity for the diminished life she leads and for the condition of shakul—the state of having lost a child—which they now share. His visits are not presented as a restoration of their marriage or their former domestic life. Rather, in the name of Miraijin, Marco takes on the task Adele had performed with perseverance and tenderness while she was alive: maintaining a connection with her mother.

The family’s earlier losses shape the meaning of this new contact. After Irene’s death, the Carrera family was dispersed by grief; by the time Adele dies, its nucleus is already broken. Marco and Giacomo cannot speak to each other, and the ashes of Probus and Letizia have been scattered in the central Tyrrhenian Sea. The later tragedy does not reunite the family as a whole, but it brings Marco and Marina back into one another’s lives. Dr. Carradori’s account of the stone thrown into water gives this reversal a pattern: a disturbance in already agitated water can produce calm, even as a tragedy may unsettle a family that had previously been united.

Germany’s significance therefore changes without the clinic itself ceasing to be a place of illness. It remains where Marina is hospitalized, but it also becomes the destination of Marco’s recurring visits with Miraijin and the setting for a relationship remade through shared bereavement. The journeys do not undo Adele’s death or Marina’s chronic condition; they create a durable practice of care in their aftermath.