Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

  Central Russia, northern Russia. Saint Petersburg. Copenhagen. Stockholm. London.

  He honored the German disdain of France and a fear of their bloody revolutionary fervor, so he bypassed petty Paris.

  Returned to Germany close to fifteen years after he had left. It had been a diverting exercise.

  His satchel was now several trunks. He was getting older and they were too heavy to lug around anymore. He set himself up in business, a small shop behind cheery mullions that looked out over a seedy square east of the center of Munich. Despite the out-of-the-way location, he began to do a brisk business for his carved figurines. Parents called them toys, and bought them for their children. Drosselmeier never contradicted them.

  The Nutcracker was travel-weary, chipped and bashed and showing his age. Dirk had made a sword for him out of the old broken knife blade, and fixed it with a leather thong slung around his hips. The Nutcracker presided over the toy shop. His eyes bulged while overlooking his domain. Superior to it, protective while faintly irritated all the time at matters of unknown complication. The only fresh part of him was the thrush feather, which Dirk tried to replace once a year.

  Then one snowy evening, as Dirk was about to close up shop and retire his awl and knives to their wallet, and tidy the wood shavings up to feed to the stove, the little bell on the front door tinkled. A late customer pushed through, brushing snow off his lapels. He wore a ginger beard in the Prussian style and his eye was guarded and acute.

  “They say you’ve become the best toy maker in town,” he said. “How did I miss you all these years?”

  “Well, well,” said Dirk. “Good evening, Felix.”

  66.

  “So it is you,” said Felix Stahlbaum. He clenched both palms upon the head of his walking stick as if he might pick it up and thrash Drosselmeier with it. His hands were angry but his face seemed wry. The smile was tentative, perhaps slightly acidulous. But what did Dirk Drosselmeier comprehend, now or ever, about what the expressions of people meant? He knew himself to be a simple-minded person. Or perhaps not—but in any case, he communicated as a simple-minded person. It was safer.

  Speak in short sentences.

  Avoid the abstract.

  Beware the extremes of feeling. Enough of Goethe’s poor miserable Werther—let him get on with it and kill himself over that fool Charlotte. Spare us the bombast and the breast-beating.

  Admire the little, the low. What lies unnoticed by the steadying gaze of educated citizens of one nation or the next.

  Trying to divert Wu Min from the subject of ancestry, he had made the mistake once of asking her about her own early memories. A month later when she had paused for breath, he went for a stroll, hoping to find a way to sever his cranium from his shoulders. The world of delights and advancements, slights and misapprehensions that constituted her young life! She was a savant. She was normal. He was the idiot.

  When in turn she had asked him about his childhood memories, he had only answered something about a mother mouse and six babies. She had taken that as a metaphor and assumed he had five dead siblings, and wept on their behalf. His protestations that he didn’t speak with Oriental theatricality were useless. She loved him the more for his apparent deficits and losses.

  Wu Min had asked the names of his original carers. He couldn’t supply them. In fact, all he could really say was that, as he’d grown older himself, he’d realized that they hadn’t been quite as ancient as they’d seemed when he was a boy. The old woman had had shapely legs; the old man’s beard had been brown, not grey. They were simply peasants, untutored in the ways of the world and therefore frightened of it.

  The less he could answer about his parents, the more Wu Min cradled him, until finally he fled.

  The silence in his own head wasn’t the sound of loneliness, he discovered. There was nothing to be lonely for.

  Yet here was Felix Stahlbaum. His chin elevated by slow degrees as if he was letting his eyes take their time to accustom themselves to the gloom of the toy shop.

  “Some people you expect to see again, and some you never do,” said Felix.

  “I expect nothing,” said Dirk. Perhaps he had become a little Buddhist in his travels—it had never occurred to him before. But he stood as he spoke, the work desk between them.

  Felix: “Are you closing up shop?”

  “That depends. Are you in the market to buy some toys?”

  “Are you free to join me at dinner?”

  Dirk thought about that. What did free mean? Once the question had been placed in the room, was there any freedom left about the matter? The question really could be stated as this: Was Dirk free to decline the invitation? And he didn’t know if he was that free. On what basis?

  Yet on what basis might he be free to accept?

  “Join me for dinner,” said Felix cunningly, as if realizing that a command was more effective than a request. He rapped the iron head of his walking stick upon the workbench.

  “Let me put away the figurines I’ve been repairing.” To buy himself some time, to be able to turn away, Dirk picked up the wooden Zouave in his turban, and the Hussar in his green and gilt jacket, and he put them on the shelf above the stove. In the waves of heat the two figures seemed to buckle at the knees and then straighten up.

  “Is this all your handiwork? You have considerable skill,” said Felix. “I shall have to buy something.”

  “I am at your service,” said Dirk.

  67.

  Later, in Dirk’s memory, all the conversations ran together. By tiny adjustments the world shocks itself and becomes bored again at almost the same instant.

  But he didn’t forget the first time that they sat over a glass of golden schnapps in the firelight of a small salon behind Peterskirche, where Felix was apparently a regular customer.

  Dirk looked at Felix more closely now that Felix wasn’t looming over him. A level edge to Felix’s brow that Dirk didn’t remember. Perhaps a strengthening of certain facial muscles, the ones exercised by wincing. Hard to particularize how a face grows older. Eyes, perhaps, become less romantic and more capable of scrutiny. At least Felix’s eyes—in this light, hazel with a cast of moss. Of the character of his own eye Dirk had no idea beyond its color—cloud blue—for looking-glasses only show the masks we employ, those masks needed in considering ourselves.

  “Tell me where you went,” said Dirk, before Felix could pose a question.

  The man relaxed a little. “Isn’t what happened to you more interesting?”

  “Not to me; I’ve been in my own life too long already. You disappeared.”

  “I didn’t disappear. I went back to university.”

  “You never came to find me.”

  “Well, once I learned what had happened to that woman—Frau Pfeiffer—I wasn’t sure if you’d forgive me.”

  “What had I to forgive you for?”

  “Distracting you, maybe, from your duties?”

  “My duties were my own, and any dereliction of them is a matter I take up with myself, not with you. Not that you gave me the chance after that.”

  Felix sipped the schnapps. “I did come by once, you know. The following summer. I was back in Überlingen, to stay with the von Koenig family again. One market day the family bundled itself to Meersburg, and I stopped by the Pfeiffer home. You weren’t there, nor the small boys. Only the husband and another person, a woman of some proportion.”

  “Ach. Gerwig with Cordula, the second Frau Pfeiffer.”

  “I asked after you. Did they tell you?” Felix furrowed his brow in mock indignity.

  “They didn’t. But what if they had? I had no social standing to storm the von Koenig parlors to see you.”

  “Well, I wanted to know how you were.”

  “I suppose they told you how I was.”

  “I suppose they didn’t. Does anyone know much about you?”

  Dirk laughed. “You were always public! That music. I have never forgotten it.”

  “You’re not
going to speak about yourself? Again.” Felix toyed with a spoon. “Well. As to the ’cello. Enjoy whatever tissue of memories you have about that. I don’t play an instrument anymore.”

  “Oh, no. Don’t tell me that. Why ever not?”

  “I accepted at last that I have a better ear than I could ever have fingers or—or musical—. I don’t know the word. Adroitness. Musical wit, if you will. So it was a punishment for me to listen to my own inept attempts at transcendence. Have you ever heard a person who is mostly deaf try to speak? The garble of it? I played like that, all garble. In the end, I wasn’t willing to offend the music or its composers by treating it so shabbily.”

  “You had much to offer.”

  “You don’t listen to enough music if you think that.”

  They ate from the table d’hôte, a veal dish with lemons and carrots and a portion of thin shaven potato slices in vinegar. “I am going to pay for this meal,” said Felix. “So you owe me entertainment.”

  “I should have brought my most recent friend: an oaken Mandarin from Old Cathay with a wooden moustache that reaches on two sides of his chin right down to his curly-toed slippers. I’d have made him dance for you.”

  “Once, I’d rather you offered to dance for me.”

  “Oh, Felix,” said Dirk. What a confusion, to feel flat and alert at the same time. Of that notion of Felix’s about the possession of musical wit—it seemed to Dirk that Felix had had a capacity, while Dirk could feel in himself an absence of wit nearly as firmly as he imagined he might have felt its presence. He struggled for words. “You only needed to ask me.”

  “L’esprit de l’escalier. I did try to ask you.”

  “This is a fine portion of veal.”

  “You were too besotted with Nastaran to hear me out.”

  “I don’t like to talk about her.”

  “I was crude, I admit it. I played with you, that time we spent a night in the farmer’s barn. In the snow-storm. Do you remember that night? You couldn’t know, but I found out.”

  Dirk looked at his fork, laid like a little hand upon the scallop of meat, its silver fingers bowed open, upward, to receive.

  “I murmured to you while you were sleeping—”

  “Felix, stop.”

  “I talked to you about her—”

  “Really, I don’t want you—”

  “I was trying to find out for sure. If it was Nastaran who excited you.”

  Dirk shook his head. He wasn’t one for tears, and had never been; this was about as close as he came. “And you—” He harrumphed. “And you—”

  “Well, and I found out. When I whispered of her in the dark, you responded as any lover would when considering his beloved.”

  “Felix.”

  “You couldn’t know, you were asleep, but I learned what I had to learn.”

  “Felix.”

  “Yes.”

  Dirk said, “I was responding to you, I think.”

  It was Felix’s turn to put his fork down. He laid it upside down, in a closed position, its tines in the viscous sauce, a few bread crumbs stuck to the arched hip.

  Dirk’s voice was low. “I wasn’t asleep yet. I heard you. I can’t tell you what happened fully—who knows anything about that sort of thing? But it was your voice I was responding to. At least in part. The music in your voice.”

  The maître d’ approached to supply a bottle of sweet wine before they began to talk again, a few moments later.

  “So you see,” Dirk finally said, “I was ready to dance.”

  “You’re the one with the eye-patch. But how blind of me.”

  “Ah well. You need only have asked.”

  “You could have asked, too, you know.”

  “Me?” Dirk snorted. “I don’t have that kind of language in me.”

  “If you need to speak, you learn a language.”

  “Touché. Someday I will learn.”

  “And all along,” said Felix, “I thought you hadn’t been back in touch with me because of Nastaran. I thought you felt guilty about her death.”

  “There wasn’t much to feel guilty about. I didn’t invent the snow-storm that kept us from returning that night.”

  “I’ve always wondered, Dirk.”

  “What have you wondered?”

  “Whether you knew when we left that she wouldn’t be there when you returned.”

  “Felix!”

  “It isn’t that improbable. You knew how unhappy she was. I wondered if she had talked you into taking the boys away, clearing a moment in which to end her own life.”

  “That would have made me culpable.”

  “Well. In a fashion, perhaps.”

  “How dare you!” Dirk couldn’t speak of her. She had left a lambent stain that sometimes wicked itself forward into his nightly dreams from some casket locked during the daylight.

  Felix shrugged. “I don’t mean it as an offense.”

  “Anyone who might help someone take her own life is committing murder. I’m outraged.”

  “You needn’t see it that way. Death might be the only way forward for someone. Or it might seem so at the time. The Werther solution. I wondered if you were plunged into regret for your complicity.”

  “Complicity!”

  “Oh, you’re capable of agitation. I oughtn’t be surprised. I’m wrong in this matter, too? So I’m wrong. You needn’t fuss so. Even the scope of your umbrage gives one pause, though.” He began to eat again. “They have a fine torte mit schlag here, I can’t recommend it highly enough.”

  Dirk pushed his plate away. “I’ve had enough. I can’t eat any more. Let’s go.”

  “Where do you propose?” Felix signaled the staff and withdrew a purse from a string around his neck. “Will you come home with me?”

  He was ready for that. “Yes.”

  “Very well.” Felix laid out the coin on the tabletop and from a standing position took a last forkful of veal. “Everyone will be thrilled to meet you.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Ethelinda and the children.”

  Dirk jostled the table pushing back his chair. The plate rocked; the fork jumped to the floor. It landed like a thrown tool, its tines down in a seam between old floorboards.

  68.

  Felix Stahlbaum led Dirk Drosselmeier to a prosperous residential neighborhood of Munich, a boulevard that, somehow, Dirk had never before come across. Linden trees flanked both sides of the road and also stood in single file along a narrow strip of garden in the middle, which ran from one end of the road to the other. Snow began to fall with a sound like small claws—brittle pellets rasping against a few dried leaves clinging still. Felix stopped before a house at the bottom of the road and fished for a key in his greatcoat. The establishment was tall and warm-looking, its stucco the color of the flesh of pale Oriental peaches. White tinged with cream and blood. Lamps glowed behind windows that were shuttered on the ground level and draped in the upper stories.

  “You’ve rooms here?”

  “This is my home.” Felix bounded up the stone steps, gesturing. He turned as he was bending to insert the key, and winked. “Marriage confers considerable privileges, as perhaps you know. The boys are Günther and Sebastian.”

  Dirk didn’t answer, but allowed himself to be swept into the vestibule and then the atrium.

  A sort of banner ran above the lintels of the broad doors marking a margin between the ground-floor level and the gallery above. A frieze. It was colored like blancmange and animated with plaster bas-reliefs of Graeco-Roman figures cavorting in procession. The atrium rose two stories, a central well of chillier air within that cheery home. It was bright at the entry level and upon the stairs, and dark up at the ceiling; a canopy of glass upon black iron struts. Grey glass upon which snow had fallen.

  Sounds of domestic mayhem sputtered behind closed doors. Unalloyed odors of tar soap and caramelized carrots gently offended. Someone was performing upon a clavichord with stupendous lack of aptitude. A door slammed, a child sh
rieked, a woman’s voice gave firm command, something fell and smashed. “Papi!” cried a child, and a figure—several figures actually—ran along the upstairs gallery, behind a balustrade with wrought iron teased into flourishes, spears, and sheaves. The noisy arrivants tumbled down the arched stone staircase at the back of the hall.

  A manservant, meanwhile, had come to take Felix’s coat and brush the snow away. Dirk was handing his hat to the aide when a flaxen-haired child, a boy most likely, leapt into Felix’s arms. Just behind the lad capered a King Charles spaniel with tangerine markings. The dog, elegant enough, appeared confused and consequently frantic. It skidded to a halt before Felix and Dirk, and ran circles around them, leaping up and nipping at Dirk’s heels and calves.

  “Otto! Otto von Blotto!” cried the child. “Stop that!”

  But Otto von Blotto was aggravated, and his bark had the curve of the scimitar in it. The sound rang like steel against the marble noses of the busts of eighteenth-century unknowns. “God in heaven, an intruder at last!” called a woman’s voice from above. “So our meek Otto has the menace of the Cavalier in him after all!”

  “What’s gotten into him?” asked Felix, laughing. “He’s never like this. Clearly he thinks you are somebody else.”

  “I am somebody else,” said Dirk.

  “Take Otto away and then come back and give our guest a proper good evening, Günther liebchen,” said Felix. “Oh, the surprise of it.” The child, Günther, picked up the agitated animal and turned away. The dog scrabbled to the boy’s shoulder, fixing Dirk with an accusatory eye, yapping with increased alarm at being exiled. Günther, in green velveteen, seemed all done up for an occasion of some sort. He couldn’t be more than seven, thought Dirk.

  The woman descended. “Unexpected society, Felix.”

  “Ethelinda, let me present an old friend—Herr Drosselmeier. Perhaps you remember him . . . ? Dirk, this is Frau Stahlbaum.”