Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

  Dirk swallowed. “She asked me to find the key.”

  “We all have our secret alphabets. Private codes of gesture and symbol. Perhaps there was an actual walnut tree in the garden of her youth. Who knows. All children want to know the hidden meaning of the world, until they grow up and resign themselves to it being unknowable. Every closed walnut that fell at her feet in that cherished past held, perhaps, more possibility than anything that has happened since. I can’t say. In any case, I prefer now to talk to you about your own vision.”

  Dirk snorted. “My vision? As in a rosy past like Nastaran’s? I have no vision. I hardly have a past.”

  “I want to ask you something personal. I’m curious. I’ve heard of situations like yours many times, but I’ve never met anyone before who has”—he seemed to struggle for the right words— “who has died, and then come back to life.”

  “I fear you are addled this morning, Herr Doktor.”

  “Sit back down. I am not done. Don’t be angry. You spoke, too, yesterday morning. You do not remember? I’m not surprised. I want to ask you now about the knife, and the bird, and the lost forest. About how you died, and what you saw, and how you came back to life. Here, I thought you might need this. The French call it eau-de-vie. I had it smuggled in. I’m partial to it of a morning, but in this case I offer it to you medicinally. Do you need to lie down? Take your time. I can wait.”

  And then: “Now, tell me what you have remembered. Tell me everything.”

  45.

  Once, Dirk heard himself say, once there was a boy who lived in a small cabin in the deep woods with no one for company but an old woman and an old man.

  He was a foundling, a child of unknown provenance, and the old woman and old man cared for the boy kindly until the day they decided to kill him. At the old woman’s command, the old man turned his woodcutter’s axe upon the boy.

  “And then?” asked Mesmer.

  “It’s a story, and that’s all I know,” said Dirk, in a foul dark tone.

  “But the old man lived.”

  “I suppose.”

  “And you lived, too.”

  “Oh, me?” Dirk surprised himself with his own mocking tone. “I was merely telling you a story. Me, I’m from someplace else.”

  “Where?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Anyway I’m not the type to husband my memories. Are you thinking I am wounded as Nastaran, with her ferocious past of locked walnuts? I’m more like a spider—or a burdock—I cling with strings and hooks only to every passing day. I haul little or nothing along with me.”

  The old doctor said, “The Latin word for luggage is impedimenta. But we all carry things, whether we know it or not. I think you carry your own death, uncompleted. Or revoked temporarily. I think—please don’t flinch like that, it makes me feel I haven’t adequately tended to my morning ablutions—I think you’re one of those very few people who have ever died and come back to life.”

  “I see the eau-de-vie has much to recommend it.”

  “You cut. You wound. Sarcasm is to be expected in the young and stupid. Patience, please. And listen to me. Human literature has always spoken of certain—passages. Transitions. Transports. Homer tells of Odysseus going into Hades to interview Achilles; and without intention to blaspheme, may I remind you that the Christ descended into Hell? Dante saw the fiery pit in his great poem. But those are legends and lore; they are faith and fictions. Not everyone is a character in a story, Herr—what did you say your last name was?”

  “Drosselmeier.”

  “I have a wide circle of medical associates. True, some no longer answer my petitions for a loan . . . that’s a different matter. In the interest of truth we must be willing to be called a Dr. Slop, a charlatan, a ‘verray parfit praktisour,’ as Chaucer has styled the Physic in his tales. I don’t care what they say of me. Mozart was beastly. What was I talking about?”

  Dirk suspected the Doktor cared deeply about what was said about him. The old man regained his thought and rushed on. “What is missing from the imaginative histories of the ancients, and likewise from the venerable faiths? Tell me.”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps: reason?”

  “Wrong. What’s missing from the literature of our species are the stories of the peasants. The filthy illiterate. Those with no firm address, no surname. No one to impress, nothing to lose. But the poor tell stories, too. Ordinarily, only women wise with herbs, or father confessors, or we doctors—only we ever hear those stories. And what we hear! There is such a thing, it seems, as dying and visiting the other land, and coming back to life.

  “When I helped Nastaran to liberate the seized channels of memory, you were here, too. When she fell silent, you spoke. You told me that you had been murdered, and you went to another place, and something happened there. And then you came back. But you were not the same.”

  “Did I also tell you where I hid that crock of golden shit I meant to go back and reclaim? Please remind me.”

  “You are trying to shame me. I’m too brazen to be shamed, and I’m too old to bother with you if you won’t cooperate. There was a tree you cut down, you killed. It was a sacred tree in a severed forest, and in dying, you yourself went to the lost forest.”

  “I don’t understand your words. A severed forest?”

  The old man put his fingertips together like the ribs of a fish, and tapped his thumbs five times. “In dying, you lost something, I think, and you also gained something. You possess something I don’t have. I have curiosity. But you have knowledge.”

  “I have a headache.”

  “Must you be stubborn? Of course you must: It is your youth. Most of the people who have experiences like the kind you’ve had are much older, some of them at the end of a long life. When they come back—oh, through a tunnel, they sometimes say, or down from a great height where they were floating above their bodies, or out of a blinding white light at once peaceful and abnegating—they are often furious at being revived. And they can be terrifically different people than they were before. But I never heard of it happening to a child.”

  “What causes this—this detachment—to happen?” asked Dirk. Unconvinced, he was looking for a way to undercut the mad Doktor’s assertions.

  “I once knew a man who was struck by lightning. Those who ran to him said his heart had failed. It was stopped for ten minutes as they carried his body through the barley. At the edge of the meadow, startled by a wild boar bolting from a ravine, they dropped the poor corpse, and the heart in the corpse began to pound again. The man recovered, and raved about his journey into the otherness. But I saw that he was never the same. He would not look at or address his wife, and the comforts of the pulpit and the pew were as burning coals on his ears and heart. He sat in a doorway like someone twice his age, unable to work the fields anymore, and he died again several years later. His hand tangled in his beard, as his face remained unshaven from the day of lightning unto the night of the actual grave.”

  “I suppose I shall have to remember to shave, no matter what comes.” But Dirk’s voice was less strident now.

  “Shall I tell you another case? This one is hearsay, but from a reliable observer. A man of probity.”

  The boy didn’t nod, neither did he shake his head to forbid it.

  “The woman was not gifted in noetics.” At Dirk’s shrug, Doktor Mesmer said, “Noetics. Having to do with knowledge and canniness. I am trying to say that she had all the perspicacity of . . . of a shrub. A bucket. A slab of mutton. I’m told her speech was slow, and her sentences rarely reached a verb. She was good for nothing but carrying rags for the rag man. An itinerant without a real home.”

  “The poorhouse ought have taken her in.”

  “Now, this middle-aged woman had a dreadful swelling in the forehead like a bald peach pit. People avoided her. They said the contusion was the stump of a devil’s horn, and though she’d been able to break off the prong, the root remained, poisoning her. My colleague, a fellow in Vienna, offered to try t
o cut it out for her. He promised her enough liquor to make her pass out, which appealed to her. Perhaps she hoped she would die under his knife, and dying dead drunk would be better than life. Or perhaps she was too dull to disagree with his proposals. At any rate, the operation went ahead, for her benefit and for his medical curiosity.”

  “Did she awaken as a knife plunged into her skin?”

  And here Dirk remembered the axe in the old man’s leg, and his awful screams.

  “I will admit my colleague drew a veil over those unseemly details. I think ropes may have been involved. But the important part is that the dreadful devil’s root was indeed removable, and the head bandaged, and the woman seemed to leave this valley of sorrow and lie stony and limp upon the board. She was cold as a riverbed in March. Then, I’m told, after an hour or so of death, quite suddenly, she revived. She survived a prodigious loss of blood, she slept for seven days, and when she woke up . . .”

  “Waking up, that’s good . . .”

  “She spoke in a language never heard on earth. No one else could understand her for the rest of her life. But she spoke—voluminously. Like a cataract, night and day, even in her sleep. It made her distressing to be with, as she stared at those around her with maddened eyes, entirely unable to share whatever it is she had seen while she was dead.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “In the end they had to lock her in a tower room. I believe she slipped and fell from a high window.”

  “I still don’t know what this has to do with me.”

  The old man mopped his brow with a stained cloth. “You said things while—oh, why should I be falsely modest—while Mesmerized. As some folks call it, admiringly or not. You said things that led me to think you have had a similar experience. But you were young. You were a child. You went someplace and came back. Would it bother you if I asked some questions?”

  “I oughtn’t stay too much longer.”

  “You can come back another time. I made notes. I can wait.”

  “Do it quickly. My life has many turns. Perhaps on the way home I will be struck by a woman throwing herself out of a high tower, and I won’t see you again.”

  “You killed a tree; and then the tree killed you.”

  Dirk waited. Motes of dust revolved in the lamplight. The drawn curtains gapped at the top, revealing a dart of dulled sky. He said at last, “That isn’t a question.”

  “You went to a forest. It was not a forest of the mortal world.”

  “Dreams are not of the mortal world, Herr Doktor.”

  “If it was not a dream, where did you go?”

  “If I have no answer, it must have been a dream.”

  “You spoke to someone? A spirit of some sort, maybe a spirit of the forest? What the Greeks called a dryad? Or was she called Pythia?”

  “These are questions?”

  “Did you speak to a wood-nymph?” Then: “If you don’t want to say, tell me this: Did you talk to someone else?”

  “You’re making fun of me. You’re horrendous.”

  “Young man. I know what it means to be ridiculed. I wouldn’t turn against someone the same weapons that have been raised against me.”

  But Dirk couldn’t quite believe him, believe any of this. He got up and left the room without replying, or even nodding farewell. Tore down the stairwell of the seedy Heilig-Geist Spital, past the suffering old souls with their whimpering or catatonia, and threw open the door into the safer, untheoretical world.

  46.

  The closed drapes of Herr Doktor’s chambers had hidden from Dirk a change in the weather. He found himself slipping on a doorsill and sliding several steps into a street gone ghostly with snow.

  At this time of the year! It must have raged in across the lake. A few dark ravens swooped at the height of attic windows from one end of the lane to the other, like spies on a mission. Otherwise the neighborhood was deserted.

  He stumbled any which way, circling through the Schlossplatz and under the archways into the Marktplatz. For a moment the sun was a white thumbprint upon a blue-white pane of ice. Then, skirls of snow rose and fell again, until the curbs, the hitching posts, even the timbered window lintels and iron lamp-posts disappeared in annihilating impasto.

  He sensed the opening up of the square, somehow, perhaps by a characteristic of echo if nothing else. Though how to move across it diagonally to find the right lane that would lead back to Nastaran and her sons—that was impossible and would remain so until the squall moved on. He ought just stop and stand, or lean against a building. A surprised blue sky would blink overhead momentarily and citizens would start to come out and laugh at the assault.

  He moved sideways with his left arm out, to find the nearest wall and then trace it to a doorway or portico where he could huddle a moment, but no wall rose quickly to steady him. He tried to remember if a set of steps led out of the square. The old town had its drops and climbs. He didn’t want to lose his footing. He couldn’t remember. This wasn’t his town. He would never know it intimately enough to be safe here.

  It seemed for an instant that the sun had swollen and come nearer, trying to find him through the storm. A disc of white gold bumbled above him, hovering and uncertain. A touch of pale apricot, a circlet of dissolved flame—it was hard to draw into focus. He couldn’t determine what it was as it plunged, nearly overhead, with a noise separate from that of the wind.

  Then he was knocked sideways off his feet by a carriage of some sort, a sledge without horses or the like. Propelled by some arcane and invisible hand, it bumped and scraped and even bounced along the snow-gritted cobbles at a velocity unusual in a town square. Dirk fell heavily against a doorway—and caught the whiff of balsam and of some strange incense, a charcoal opiate. He felt himself lift, then drift, as if he were an integument of the wind. Absorbed into the separate whiteness of unconsciousness.

  47.

  The snow parted, retreating and lifting like ranks of theatre curtains. It didn’t stop falling, but it became less swirling and blinding. The forest emerged, crept forward. In a clearing a few inches above the white ground hovered a basket of woven wicker and bramble, large enough for Nastaran and her husband and her sons, though not perhaps for Dirk.

  He approached the carriage. No wings, no stilts or feet, no cord or pulleys—just a rustic box in the air, a tray with high sides, hovering and slipping sideways.

  Either his eye became accustomed to the light or the figures just appeared, colored shadows printed upon the obscure landscape. Within the vehicle: a woman with fierce coppery hair, her pale hands upon the balustrade of the basket. Next to her, crouched upon the rail, a hunched wizened figure, scowling. The woman wore green, the brave irresponsible color of new ferns. The other creature looked blackened as if by smoke.

  Dirk stood, he didn’t approach them, but the basket drifted nearer.

  “How long will you take?” she said to him.

  “To do what? To die?” he asked.

  “To live, to give us life.” She was cross and fiery.

  “He’s the wrong one, he hasn’t got what it takes either to live or to die,” muttered the squatting creature.

  “You have a spark inside you,” she said to Dirk. “Let it go out or let it loose, one or the other. What is your life for? You chose to live, you chose this world! What is this half-living? Even a mouse has more intention.”

  The sour companion interrupted. “Mercy on the human. He didn’t ask for us or our demands. Leave him be, leave him alone. We’re fucked.”

  “I don’t know what you are asking of me. I don’t know who you are,” Dirk replied.

  “You have the means to find out.” She folded her arms. “You don’t try.”

  “Open your heart, open your mind. Open your mouth,” said the gnome-thing. “Open your trousers. Open your ears. Open your eye.”

  “You took the knife,” said the one perhaps called Pythia. “You took it from us. What is a knife for but opening?”

  “A knife ca
n be used for killing, for severing,” said the henchman. He began to stand up. “Or for cracking open the nut-case and finding the kernel. Someone has to do it.” At full height, standing on the rail, he was only a little taller than the dryad or goddess. He lifted his head from where it crunched into his neck. His flanks were ragged fur, and from his matted hair could be noted two curving horns. “Aren’t you ashamed to be so lost? We have our own sorry excuse, but you?”

  “I died a long time ago,” said Dirk. “The old man tried to kill me, but I died before he could manage it.”

  “Listen to me.” The woman spoke in a cold voice. “We’re all severed—we are, the forest is, you are—it’s the nature of the world. Some agents can recover. For themselves, for us, for others. What are you waiting for?”

  “Lost is not an address, it’s not a permission to fail, it’s not an excuse.” With shocking vigor, like that of a young warrior, the creature hopped upon the ground and approached on cloven hoof. “It’s a reason to read the world.” His breath was meaty, his animal nakedness unnegotiated. “Panic,” he said, either a prediction or a directive. “Panic.” Leaning backward so the goat-man wouldn’t be able to press his hands upon his lapel, Dirk stumbled. “Open panic, open the past, open something,” snarled the creature.

  48.

  Dirk started, jolted by the hand on his lapel. The forest was gone. Its intensity, its panorama turned inside out—a landscape of hills and wildness brushed up close, as close as clothes—it was all gone.