Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

  “The boys say you are re-leafing the trees.”

  She allowed herself to take his hand and climb down. “The brutality of this German world. A wind decides the season is over, all in one morning, and annexes my garden without permission. I am not going to let it happen.” She had string wrapped around one wrist, he now saw, and on the ground sat a basket of gilded fruits, were they? She saw him looking. “Last year Herr Pfeiffer saw some Lauscha baubles in a market in Munich. He brought them for me to hang on a fir tree at the Nativity. But those are frail; they break when a wind blows upon them. I prefer to make my own.” She reached down and lifted one for him to examine. It was a hard walnut painted over with gold.

  “You scared the boys. They thought you were hanging the leaves back on the tree.”

  “I’ve tried that. They don’t stay.” Nastaran was laughing at him, maybe. An openhearted smile, at last. Everyone has one to give the world, at least once; this he believed.

  “When did you make these?”

  “When I can’t come outside during the day.”

  “Why can’t you come outside?” Bold of him to ask.

  She took a while before replying. “Too little here of what I might want to come outside for. But this helps, doesn’t it? Look, the wind turns them, the sun dances. It is a magic garden.”

  And now he saw it. The well-clipped trees were all dressed in invisible silks suggested by the formality of lines of string and by the golden walnuts hung at various heights. Who dares to try and best Dame Nature at her beauties, he wondered? Only someone who is ill.

  “That Herr Doktor,” said Dirk. “He said the key to your unhappiness was held within the walnut.” But Dirk was wrong to have mentioned unhappiness in this rare moment. Her face took on a pensive look.

  “That is a Doktor’s way of speaking,” she replied. “He means something other than what he says. Why should there be a key in a walnut? And anyway, how would I get it out? To smash a walnut with a hammer is to crush what is inside.”

  “What is inside the walnut shell?” He wanted to know, but he wasn’t sure that was the question.

  “The walnut? When mixed with pomegranate, is the sweet grainy sauce of a fesenjan, a stew in which spring chicken is served. With pistachios and honey the walnut is baked in pastries fit to offer a Shah, or Mullah Nasruddin himself. It is put out in small bowls on the carpet at the end of the meal. It is sweetened and fermented with hazelnuts, and my father serves it to his brothers as my mother clears away the meal.” She made an effort to control the shaking in her voice. “Your friend, Herr Doktor, he has loosened much in me. The past is a temptation.” He could see her trying to become everyday. “The past is too much to bear. Surely you have such a walnut in your own life, something that holds the key to all your past ease and safety.”

  “I have had little ease and safety in my life.”

  “Doesn’t even the comfort of well-known foods evoke your treasured innocence? What your mother cooked for you? For my boys it will be gingery sauerbraten. For me it is fesenjan and baklava. What is it for you, then?”

  The wrong question for him. “There wasn’t enough to eat. There is nothing to call me back there. It wasn’t a garden. It was a dark, fierce woods, dangerous, and I died there.”

  Then she sat on the chair she had hauled from the house. She gestured to her handiwork. “This is crude and shallow, but it’s all I know how to do. It brings nothing back to me. It mocks me and proves futility.”

  In a small voice, Dirk replied: “I have said the wrong thing. Forgive me.”

  “There is no right thing to say.”

  She tried to control her anger. “My father was a merchant in the Persian port city of Bandar-e Bushehr. In a last attempt to improve his finances, he traveled to Europe. He told me he hoped to find other trading merchants, ones who might offer more favorable terms. Now I believe he took me abroad so I wouldn’t live to see him impoverished, perhaps murdered for failure to pay his debts. Herr Pfeiffer and I met in Amsterdam, in as accidental a way as you and I have met. For a month his attentions distracted me from nostalgia, and by the time I woke up, we were married. All I have from home besides a trunk of clothes is a dotar made of walnut wood, which I have no talent to play.”

  “Did Herr Preiffer hope you would learn to play a—a dotar?”

  “This is all distraction. I shall tear it down.” Her arm shot out like a scimitar and caught the nearest walnut and wrenched it, and smashed it upon the gravel walk. Being a walnut, it did not break, but lay there like a gold button off an ogre’s waistcoat.

  “Stop,” said Dirk. “It may mean less to you than you want. But it means something to them.” For out of the corner of his eye he saw Franz and Moritz; they’d finished swinging and come back in the garden, and were running around the perimeter, leaping among the golden walnuts like a pair of ignorant spring lambs who cannot yet control their limbs.

  52.

  Dirk had never heard such a parcel of rubbish in his life as that romantic fiction perpetrated by Doktor Mesmer. But how curious. While Mesmer may have actually garnered some thoughts from Dirk—however disassociated from reality they were, goat-satyrs and oracles and meandering sacred groves!— the old charlatan must have taken an image or two and used them to plant this spurious capriccio into Dirk’s untutored mind. And now—now there was some truth to it, even if it was only the truth of a story that, once heard, becomes history. You might forget a story, but you can never unhear a story.

  By that token, you might forget an event, but you can never go back to living as you did before its hidden influence was applied upon you.

  Pan and the Pythia. The lost forest. What a saddlebag of crap!

  Still, when Nastaran began to run a fever a few days later and took to her room, admitting only the cook with goblets of steamed lemon water and honey, Dirk distracted the fretful boys with a story.

  “Tell us again about the Little Lost Forest,” they said. Dirk realized they were talking as if it were a living character in a story-book. As if it had agency, desire. “Tell us where it is now.” Dirk, with his limited sense of European geography, talked the forest up the slopes of Mount Olympus and down the other side. He made it a silent partner in some Balkan war between the Tribes of Good and Evil. The next night Dirk proposed that the homeless woods had witnessed the crowning of Charlemagne and saved the day because when the Emperor thought he was dreaming in a forest grove at midnight, it was really the Little Lost Forest hiding him from his enemies, those wicked (wicked what? Sicilians? Lombards? Saracens? Oh, the English, the wicked English!) . . . those wicked English enemies, who wanted to find him and cut off his head and steal his crown.

  All the while Dirk hoped his voice was carrying, and that Nastaran would hear what a jolly helpmeet he was being, and take some sort of comfort. It seemed the only kind of comfort he could offer her, and from such a hurting distance.

  He unwrapped the old knife from its leather wallet. Where had the funny thing come from, really? He had grabbed it from the hut in the forest where he had spent some early days, once upon a time, with an old man and an old woman. The old man had been a woodcutter, and this knife had been his knife, and Dirk had stolen it and bravely run away. He couldn’t remember why.

  It made a nice story, or the beginning of a story. Dirk didn’t know how it went on, though, so he didn’t bother to tell that one to the boys. He used the knife to carve them a few rough figures of soldiers. It seemed the blade wasn’t dulling with time, but growing keener. A trick of its metallic makeup.

  53.

  Another letter from Pfeiffer. He was delayed still. His ailment had grown into a pulmonary spasm. He could not sit up without a punishing cough. He couldn’t yet leave his bed.

  Nastaran folded the letter into her lap. They were sitting in the orchard garden. “Who else, I wonder, cannot manage to leave his bed,” she murmured in a costive voice. It was the bitterest and also the healthiest Dirk had ever heard her. He set the boys to playing with
the few little wooden soldiers coming home from the Napoleonic wars. Dirk had carved them poorly; they were little more than pegs with identifying noses. Still, the boys personalized them with crude and consistent behaviors, different for each. Dirk made up a story about a river they must forge here, see, on this broken branch, across this scarf that will be a stream, all right?—no one must fall in or the others will have to save him! Then Dirk retired to a bench in the frosty sunlight.

  “All this is making a menace for you, but it needn’t be,” said Dirk. “Nastaran”—he had not before dared to use her name without an honorific—“no one adores a wife more than Herr Pfeiffer does you. Otherwise he wouldn’t have taken such pains to bring me into your household, so I might be an assist to you.”

  “I am a sore trial to him, with my airs and vapors and, and, the offenses I take. I would leave me were I him. I would leave myself if I could.”

  “Did your experience with the Herr Doktor afford you any relief?”

  She grunted. “We are all migrants. We are exiled from the place where meaning meant something.”

  He waited, picking at calluses near his fingernails.

  “Look.” By way of explanation, she rotated a hand at her boys. Across the garden they were squatting beside the plugs of wood, moving them this way and then, while conducting muttered negotiations of the utmost seriousness. “Do you realize that they live someplace that we don’t?”

  He felt he almost apprehended what she meant . . .

  “Those boys and us—we only seem to be sharing a life here. The young are entirely separate. They are someplace else right now. They won’t join us in our lives, really, until they are grown. And by then, who will they become? People I don’t know. And I may not even be here when they get here.”

  “Where will you be?”

  She didn’t answer, but it was a normal silence this time, not a troubled one. Perhaps Herr Doktor Mesmer’s peculiar methods had massaged some paralyzed process within her back into operation. Dirk reached out and covered the hand in her lap with his. She didn’t twitch, neither did she add her other hand to clasp his.

  “Those who sit in the house of grief will someday sit in the garden,” she said.

  “This garden?”

  “I was reciting a ghazal from the Divan of Hafez. ‘The bruised soul will find honey.’” Then she added a few more lines in Persian.

  “We have that much in common, you know,” he said. “We’re both exiled from something long ago.”

  “Maybe you did die once,” she said. “When it is my turn, I will not come back the way you did.”

  The boys shrieked. A soldier had fallen into the raging torrent, and one by one the others jumped in, too. Whether to rescue their drowning colleague or to relish the solidarity of a community suicide, Dirk couldn’t tell.

  He couldn’t carve a magic key into Nastaran’s secret garden. He couldn’t open any golden walnut that might harbor such a key. But perhaps Dirk could make a figure that could open some ordinary walnut. It was the possibility of hope that mattered, he knew.

  He took his hand from her lap and put it in his pocket. He felt the knife with the carved figure squatting on the blunt knoll of its handle. He imagined that it could speak, but the language it talked in—some obscure tongue, a lingua hellenica, or maybe a lingua magicis—how could he know that argot?

  54.

  Then Nastaran took him to the small office with the dusty drapes and Pfeiffer’s bookkeeping ledgers. She opened a locked drawer and withdrew from a sack of pounded grey leather a healthy fistful of coins. She sorted out a few gulden and a scraping of florins. She wrapped them in a cloth and handed the parcel to Dirk. He wondered if he was being asked to find other employment.

  “You need to take the boys to visit their uncle in Oberteuringen,” she told him.

  “I haven’t heard about that from Herr Pfeiffer,” he replied.

  “At this time of year, their father usually does it, but”—she looked about with a studied theatricality he hadn’t seen before in her, as if to suggest she was just noticing—“he isn’t here.” She shrugged. “If we wait till he bothers to recover and then to return, the snow may come and the chance disappear. Their uncle is expecting his nephews, and I have written to say you will arrive with them within the week.”

  Dirk hadn’t been made head of household in absentia. He had no authority to protest. Nonetheless, he raised what few objections he could come up with.

  “Herr Pfeiffer wanted me to stay and keep watch on—” But he wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence respectfully.

  “On the household,” she answered for him. “But with the boys out of the house, no harm can come to them.”

  “You pace in your sleep,” he said forthrightly. “You could come to harm.”

  “Their father can make the trip there and back in one day if he starts early. It isn’t far. Though usually he spends the night with his brother. In any case, I shall ask the laundry maid to stay the night here.”

  “But—” He was sputtery. “I was told you never wanted another female overnight in the house—”

  “Not while Gerwig is home, of course not. Unseemly. But if the house is empty of men, that caution is lifted. You weren’t hired to defy me, Dirk.”

  One more try. “I couldn’t find that place on my own. You forget I’m not from around here.”

  She stood and closed the drawer with her hip. It was a violent gesture. “I already asked your friend, that fellow who took us to see the dream doctor, if he had time to accompany you. It seems he is taking a term off from his studies. He has told me he is more than willing to make the trip with you.”

  “When did you see him?” Dirk found himself feeling outraged.

  “I sent a note to that Doktor, who must have sent it on to the Gasthof zum Bären, where the young scholar is staying. Right in the Marktplatz. He came to visit me at my request yesterday when you were out with the boys.”

  Dirk could hardly think of what to say. She hadn’t spoken to Dirk for the first ten days of his residency in her home, and now she was inviting Felix Stahlbaum to call on her when her husband was away and her family otherwise engaged? This was novelty indeed, this was alarming.

  “We met in the garden,” she said, as if she were reading his thoughts. “For only a few moments. He was not hard persuaded. Between the two of you, there must be enough language to ask for directions. It isn’t very far.”

  Dirk didn’t know how to think about that. “I have never had children of my own. You’d entrust me with them?”

  “Has my husband been wrong to entrust them with you so far?”

  “Well—luck has been in attendance.”

  “They adore you,” she said. “Haven’t you noticed?”

  “I amuse them,” he said.

  “When they are playing their games, as in the garden the other day—I would want to be there with them. Back in childhood, or so the doctor says. But even if I could get there, somehow, could I shrink in age and stature, I still wouldn’t find them in their childhoods. For when they play, they aren’t even in their own childhoods—they are some other where. Someplace else. In the game you set for them to play. The bridge, the stream, the other place you invented for them. If I wanted to join them, I’d have to go to the size of a mouse, and become one of their toys—for they live at the scale of their toys. They are twice removed from us, you see. Contact is impossible. But you have their confidence.”

  One last try. “I really don’t think that Felix would take time away from his studies to accompany me on a trip like this. We hardly know each other, and he is committed to learning . . .”

  “You’d be surprised, Herr Drosselmeier.” Her use of his surname was an assault. “Your university friend is compliant and generous. And up for adventure. He said for you to call for him at the Gasthof zum Bären. He’ll be expecting you.”

  He was angry, shut out. She turned away from him. What could he add about dislocation—he’d never belonged
in the first place, really. He knew that.

  55.

  The chatelaine of the gasthof directed Dirk to a coffeehouse in a nearby lane. Felix looked up from the table in the corner as Dirk entered. He had commandeered the one spot in the room that daylight could reach at this hour; he sat in a scatter of dust-motes. A much-read journal was folded under his elbow. It was as if he had been expecting Dirk that very moment. A Viennese-style pastry lay half-uneaten on a plate. Felix pushed a fork toward Dirk as he claimed the chair opposite.

  “We’re to have a lark, I understand,” said Felix.

  “Your studies will suffer.”

  “I had already written my professors and advocates not to expect me back for the rest of the term. Family matters, I told them.”

  “But is your family in need of your attentions?”

  “I’d have no earthly idea. Generally, we aren’t in communication.” He waved an attendant for another coffee. “The truth is, I’ve become uncertain about the direction of my vitalities. Music and scholarship are rewarding but somehow, I fear, unsatisfactory. I’d rather discover what hasn’t yet been charted on the ruled lines of music manuscript pages or in the venerable bleatings of sages. Something of my own.”

  “And you intend to learn something original by chaperoning two young boys to visit their uncle in the mountains?”

  “It’s over the next mountain, isn’t it, where adventure always seems to begin? It’s always off a little way. Rather than, say, starting with two fellows sitting in a coffeehouse waiting for the pretty maiden to arrive—ah, there you are, Fräulein. What’s your name, then, when you’re off duty.”

  “My name is spoken for,” she replied pertly enough.

  “Well, Miss Spokenfor, may I call you Engelbertine, which is a name nearly as pretty as you, you bright angel?”

  “Would there be anything else I might supply.” She put her hands on her apron, flat against the curve of her belly. It was a protective stance of decorum that had the effect, unintended or perhaps not, of straining the fabric of the upper apron against her bosom.