Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

  Dirk rolled his eyes toward the coachman clicking the horses up front, but Felix chattered on. “The old gods steal secretly into our own times. Just as your Little Lost Forest is doing, with its Pythia and its Pan. What I’m interested in—do you want to know?”

  “No, not really.”

  “What I’m interested in, Dirk—” He shifted his rump on the seat and looked at Dirk so intently that Dirk couldn’t look away however much he wanted to. Felix pulled off his grey leather gloves and took Dirk’s face in his hands and pulled him within a few inches of his own nose. “I want to know why the Pythia and the Pan would show themselves to you, who don’t even know of their provenance, and who hardly care about it.”

  “I care,” said Dirk. He could hardly breathe. “I care. I do care.”

  59.

  The uncle was clearly a much-loved fellow. He hoisted the boys, one under each arm, as if they were squealing piglets, and romped around the barnyard with them. His wife, a stout friendly Frau with a cheery wall-eye, laughed at the reunion. Her fists clasped in a knot at her waist, and her bosom and belly shook as if well accustomed to the exercise.

  “You’ll stay the night?” Onkel Peer asked of Dirk and Felix.

  “You ought to do; there’s weather on the way,” said Tantchen Isabelle. She glanced skyward, though it was impossible to guess from which direction she thought trouble might be approaching. She seemed to be surveying east and west, past and future, all at once. “I’ll make up a mattress.”

  Felix insisted the coachman could see them back to Meersburg by nightfall. “I’ve an assignation arranged for this evening, mustn’t miss it,” he said. Oh, thought Dirk; and with whom? Old Mesmer, seeking out more secrets of other people’s lives? As if he could read Dirk’s mind, Felix said, “If I arrive on time, the von Koenig family expects me for dinner and a concert, Dirk. You could come, too.”

  “They won’t welcome me, and I wouldn’t accept if they did.” But before they could argue the matter, the coachman declared he had no intention to push his horses through bad weather. Should the lads intend to return to Meersburg by nightfall, they could do it by foot if they started at once. They might be there by sunset if they didn’t dawdle. The coachman would hunker down at Onkel Peer’s stable and return to Meersburg in the morning.

  As Dirk wasn’t eager to leave Nastaran alone for a single evening if he could help it, he bade the young Pfeiffer boys a brisk good-bye. They were too busy romping about with their uncle to reply. Tantchen Isabelle refreshed the food parcel with slices of ham and a few apples and brown bread with seeds. Then Felix and Dirk set off on foot. The sound of the boys’ laughter haunted the farmland behind them until the road turned at the heel of the hill.

  They strode with vigor. After the first half hour had passed in companionable silence, their pace slackened. Dirk asked Felix more about his interest in music and how he had come to settle on the violoncello as an instrument. Felix liked to talk about himself, so Dirk heard more about the university student than he’d ever heard about anyone before. There was the uncle in London, and a surviving grandfather somewhere on the Hanseatic coast. Felix’s parents lived alone in a village northwest of Munich. Their humble home looked out on the Dachauer Moos, a marshy sort of badlands that gave off a redolent stink. Felix abhorred it. Profoundly dispiriting. His parents had had no other children and seemed perpetually surprised to have given rise to Felix, as if they’d expected only to serve the Lord and not to serve supper. Vater Stahlbaum was a verger at the church of Saint Jakob in Dachau, which had a door handle shaped like a fish. He whipped young Felix once for liking the feeling of the fish in his clasped hand so much that he stood outside stroking it over and over instead of entering to receive the Sacrament. “So many ways to come to the holy truth,” finished Felix. “Now, your turn.”

  Dirk thought, I must be capable of saying something; I must be capable of knowing something about the world now I’ve lived in it a bit longer. Surely friendship is built on the sharing of private histories. One has to start somewhere.

  “I was born, I don’t know where. Or of whom. I was a foundling in a basket, and raised in a forest by an old man and an old woman until, I forget why, I ran away.”

  “Were their names Pan and Pythia? They sound like the same pair of people. Old and cross and full of mystery.”

  “Isn’t that anyone’s parents?”

  Felix snorted with surprise, as if Dirk had just given an amusing disquisition in classical Greek. It was only relief, Dirk guessed—relief that Dirk was capable of an actual opinion.

  But pry and prod as Felix did, Dirk couldn’t reveal much more about his origins. The old man and the old women were self-sufficient. Indeed they might have suffered some sort of fear of society, as they lived like hermits and never went to town together, and avoided all manner of travelers in the woods as best they could. “The only time I really remember someone at the waldhütte,” admitted Dirk, “was the day before I left. A man was wandering along looking for someone to share the common stories of the district, and he found the old woman and listened carefully to stories she told. She was good at storytelling, I will grant her that much.”

  “Like those philologists, the brothers from Steinau, who produced the Household Tales. Die Gebrüder Grimm. I wonder if it was someone following in their footsteps. Or if it might have been one of the brothers himself? You should ask your Mutter.”

  “I don’t know where the old people are. Or if they are alive, even. They were old when I was young.”

  “So were my parents, and they’re still alive. Sort of. We should find your old folks. We could go on a hunt. Where do they live?”

  “They are as lost as the Little Lost Forest,” insisted Dirk, and would say no more about them. Luckily, Felix’s crimson cape started to whip about his shoulders, flapping and snapping too noisily to talk above. The subject was abandoned as the travelers turned their faces into a strengthening and sharply chillier wind.

  Within another half an hour they began to think perhaps Tantchen Isabelle had been right to suggest they postpone their departure for Meersburg. A rainy slick began to fall. “We’ll not make Meersburg, and I’ll miss my concert,” said Felix. “At the rate this is falling, if it turns to snow before we regain the main road, we’ll lose the track, too.”

  When that happened, they knocked on the door of a farmhouse in whose windows a few cozy lights shone. No one answered the knock, and Dirk wanted to turn away, but Felix said, “We’ll perish in a snowy chasm, clutching each other for warmth until we die, and what good to Nastaran will you be then?” There was sense to his argument, but Dirk let Felix be the one to try the handle of the door, which opened to him easily enough.

  “Hello; we are harmless strangers in this sudden storm,” called Felix, for the house had the aroma of occupancy. Food in the kitchen before them, laid out and half-eaten; a fire in the kitchen stove, and an iron kettle of water on the boil. A cat playing with a half-dead mouse looked up at them with scorn, and the mouse escaped for a few more moments of life until the cat could return to its game. “Hail, are you at home?” called Felix again.

  A step on the stairs, and a beefy farmer with bloodied hands stumbled into the room. “Has the midwife sent you two bekloppts in her place? Where is she?”

  “I don’t know, we’re not her lads,” said Felix. “If she is on the road, she’s imperiled by this sudden snow squall. We’ve come to ask for your roof over our heads until morning.”

  “Do you know about midwifery?”

  Felix shook his head in mock horror. Dirk said, “I saw a cat give birth to kittens once. That’s all I know.”

  “You can’t stay here, my wife is in knots and the house is too small—take the water up to the chamber and let her hold your hand if she will—”

  “You have too much trouble already; we’ll risk the storm,” decided Felix, grabbing Dirk by the hand. But before they could back away, the door opened behind them and a bony-shanked woman came huffing i
n. Her skirts were tucked into her waistband, as if making allowance for having had to ride on some donkey or broomstick, whatever had come to hand. “Your Frau, she couldn’t have kept her legs closed another twenty-four hours, either nine months ago or tonight? It figures. Country women have no sense of timing,” she snapped. “What are you lads gaping at? Go tend to my mare before she breaks loose and bolts.”

  “The wife in a bad condition, and you’re late yourself.” The distressed husband held up his reddened hands. “I’ve been doing what I could.”

  “Haven’t you done enough already? Give me a quarter hour to assess the situation and I’ll holler down when I’m ready for the knife.” She lumbered for the staircase. The man paled and collapsed into a chair, which collapsed onto the floor. Dirk and Felix helped him up and Felix lit his pipe for him and stuck it in his mouth.

  “Go do as she says, and stable the mount,” said the farmer. “Blankets in the loft. You can stay there. You won’t want to be near this home. If you hear screaming, pay it no mind. I’ve sent the other children to their granny. Grab some food as you go, and don’t come back until morning unless I summon you. The goodwife will sleep on the kitchen floor if there is sleeping in her immediate future. I doubt it.”

  The night seemed to have come in. A mangy horse with a disagreeable expression allowed them to lead it around the corner of the house, where a set of sheds and barns, already settled with a white pall, were dissolving into vortices of snow. Inside, several other animals, two cows and two horses and some sheep. As he’d learned to do last summer, Dirk milked one of the cows and then the second, so he and Felix had warm milk to share in the one tin cup. Then they shucked off their sodden freezing garments and hung them to dry on pegs along with the farm implements. They climbed a ladder to a loft where, in the hay, they found several blankets and even a couple of ratty sheets, which, once the mouse droppings were flapped away, were comfortable enough. Felix had stripped to the bone, but for modesty Dirk retained his shirt, which fell to his mid-thigh, and that was something at least.

  60.

  Dirk had brought to the loft with him what was left of the staff as well as the knife with the gnome-figure handle. The crutch was almost useless now, as the narrower, earth-ended point of it threatened to splinter. The thicker part, though, the bole that fit naturally under the arm, was still solid and good. So Dirk broke the staff across his bare knee. With the old fabled knife of his childhood, he set to scraping at the hardwood knob.

  “What are you making?” asked Felix, wrapping himself in a brown blanket and lying on his side, his temple propped up by his curled fist. “Is this another of your secret talents?”

  “Another?”

  “I mean, besides talking to the spirits of the sacred grove?”

  “You ridicule me, you toy with me,” said Dirk in sudden heat. “For certain I’m a superstitious dummkopf, but why must you mock me?”

  “You’re anything but that. How many ways do I have to think of to say it? You’re an oddity among young men, Dirkie. Your thoughts are already knitted into your skull, while other lads I know haven’t yet learned that a passing observation is preamble to thought. I admire you. I’m lying here wishing I had a ’cello to play some composer’s heart out, but I don’t. Here you are on your own, and you? You set about to find a knife and a piece of wood and begin to make something out of nothing. If that isn’t magic, I don’t know what is. Don’t you see I’m envious as hell? You destroy me.”

  Dirk kept to his task. The wood turned under his shivering hands. A shapeliness lived within, a secret he wanted to find.

  Felix groaned and rolled over and threw his arm over his eyes.

  The door to the barn opened and the farmer came in. “She sent me out here to build up the fire for you,” he called up to them. “Mostly she wants me out of the way for the next little bit. You didn’t even find the stove? I keep it going in the worst of the winter for when the ice harvesters come by to work the lake.”

  Felix opened his eyes. His clothes were all down on hooks. He wasn’t going to climb naked down the ladder to help. Dirk sighed and put aside the carving and the knife, and with his shirttails flapping, he descended to the ground level. “It’s the normal stove operation; keep this grate open for air; feed the wood through here. The wind can find a thousand chinks in the roof. Believe me. The wife has sent me out here to think things over on more than one night, so I know what I’m grousing about. But with the stove going you’ll do all right.”

  “How is she?”

  “The midwife won’t say a word until there is a good word to say. That’s how they work. Bragging can taunt a hex to lurch into the fray and turn it all around. There we go. How is that?”

  A small red blaze of heat threaded into the cold. It would be enough.

  “If my cape is dry, bring it up to me, Dirk,” called Felix.

  “One the lord and one the lackey, it was ever thus,” said the farmer as he opened the door into the wind. “Keep yourselves warm, fellows.”

  Dirk draped the cape over his arm, pinched an awl from a workbench, and climbed up to the loft again. He flung the cape at Felix’s head in something like anger, though he didn’t know why. “What are you making?” asked Felix, scrabbling out from behind the red cloth.

  “A nutcracker.”

  “For me?”

  “You? No. For Nastaran.”

  “Oh.” Felix replaced the rough brown blanket with his red wool cape, which Dirk now saw had a silk lining. He had rich tastes for a boy with a minister for a father. Very nice against the skin, no doubt.

  He returned his eyes to his task. The figure was roughly cylindrical. Dirk blocked out volutes that would indicate arms held in martial strictness at the figure’s sides. The easiest sort of headpiece would be a Napoleonic conical piece, or a fez of some sort to indicate the mysterious East of Nastaran’s longing. A lancer helmet of some sort. Identity wasn’t important—indeed, Dirk wanted to avoid specificity. This could be the agent of a private brigade, coming to her rescue.

  “Why a nutcracker, of all things?”

  “To open the proverbial golden walnut, of course.”

  “Ach. Of course. Stupid of me. I see how the jaw will pivot open by lifting the coat-tail. Clever. But look, when it’s in its resting position, the cavity where the jaw will descend is exposed. It’s an open box. No heart. The heart has fled.”

  Dirk answered after a while in a lower voice. “Its heart is in its throat.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  Dirk fashioned the tunic to tighten at the waist. He scored a diagonal across the chest to indicate a bandolier of sorts, or a sash for the display of medals. What campaigns might an army of one attempt? The rescue of a sorrowful woman, nothing more vital than that. Quickly the booted feet found themselves grounded on a disk that would help the creature stand at attention, should Dirk do the job well enough. The knife whacked and flicked. Dirk brushed the cuttings off the blanket. The iron stove clicked as it warmed. He kicked the blanket down to his naked feet, sitting up at attention as Felix began slowly to drowse in the heat and in the luxury of his silky cocoon.

  By the time Dirk turned his attention to the nutcracker’s face, the wind had begun to howl about the barn as if in protest. Then it shrieked in a high-pitched note. Felix, who had rolled on his side to face away from Dirk, rolled back again. “That’s her, you know.”

  “Her?” There was only one her in Dirk’s mind. Then he realized Felix meant the farmwife in labor. “Jesus’s mercy,” he muttered, putting down his knife just for a moment and gripping Felix’s hand. The oil lamp was guttering now. Dirk didn’t want to risk ruining the nutcracker in shallow light, so he set aside the creature, which could already stand on its base, and stuck the knife into a crack in the floorboards, blade down. The gnarled ironstone creature that formed the grasp was angled as if watching the travelers balefully. Dirk took a resting position beside Felix. He lowered the lamp but didn’t want to blow it out fully. Aga
inst the sound of screaming, which turned and returned in the wind, he felt defenseless and alone.

  “It’s become warm up here,” murmured Felix. In response Dirk murmured a good night. He told his eye to close.

  Some minutes later. “Are you quite cozy?” asked Felix in a low voice.

  Dirk didn’t answer but willed his breathing to come more slowly. If he pretended to be asleep he would eventually learn to be asleep. He had no more talking in him today. He concentrated on the nutcracker in his mind, what it might do for Nastaran. It would only be a sign of Dirk’s adoration, of course, but she could keep it by her bed. If she worried about getting up and walking about in the night, looking for her childhood, the nutcracker would be there in Dirk’s stead, to guard her and protect her from terrors and affrights.

  Dirk could never enter in her cloistered room with her, so the nutcracker would be his emissary.

  He would borrow the paints in Nastaran’s attic studio and give his creature a bright red coat, and black boots, and a yellow brim to the military helmet, and perhaps epaulets if it wasn’t too late to work them into the shoulders.

  And perhaps a feather from a thrush. He must make a small hole in the front of the cap to take a plume.

  “Come here, the red cape is large enough for two,” whispered Felix.