Dirk took her measure. She had a slender belly and hips, with a high-waisted gown clasped by a cincture in the Empire style, though under her burgundy sleeves her shoulders were robust and thrown back in a military fashion. She wore a high stiff cap of uncompromising severity. Ethelinda’s eyes were kind and guarded, her skin powdered to bleakness, her chin retracted into her jaw like a turtle’s head into its shell.
“I couldn’t have had the pleasure,” she said. Dirk heard in her sentence a clever ambiguity. She was wary.
“Yes, of course, you might have, at least I think so?” replied Felix, grabbing at her hand and pulling it forward to place it in Dirk’s extended palm. “One summer at your father’s home. On the lake? Surely?”
Dirk raised an eyebrow. Felix had married— yes, he had. A von Koenig daughter. The sister of that university friend, what was his name. Kurt von Koenig.
Ethelinda Stahlbaum, née von Koenig, shook her head. “No matter. How pleasant to make your acquaintance, Herr Drosselmeier. But, Felix, you have forgotten our engagement with the Foersters. I have sent the man over to say you were detained and not to hold the meal. But really, we mustn’t delay.”
“Forgive me, my dove. But isn’t it too late to go out now? It is snowing.”
“This is Munich. In December. It always snows,” said Ethelinda. Her pleasant tone was dismissive and imperious. “I should think they could find a chair for Herr—”
“Drosselmeier,” supplied Dirk. “Madame, it’s all my fault. I hadn’t seen my old friend in many years, and we lost track of the time. I shall take my leave, asking your apologies for the disturbance.”
Günther came back into the hall. The dog was still yapping in some distant closet. “I think it was your eye-patch that frightened him,” said the boy, as his younger brother, a sprite in blue satin, came trudging forward with his thumb in his mouth. “Why do you wear it?”
“Yes, why?” asked the one who must be Sebastian.
To see these lads, Dirk was filled with a horror of loss for Franz and Moritz Pfeiffer. Those kids had been lumpy and ordinary, Persian anomalies, nothing like these elegant male sylphs. But the way the smoky Pfeiffer children had just evaporated into the husks of their sorry, leaden lives—the loss rose in him. He had to turn.
“Boys, such a personal question!” said Felix. “Shame on you.”
“But he’s a person, so of course the question is personal,” replied Günther, covering his own eye with a patch of fingers.
More or less leaving the matter open to discussion, Dirk made a gesture to request his coat again. How foolish, allowing himself to be beached here in a very wrong place.
Ethelinda addressed her husband. “The Foersters, they’ve been preparing for the feast-day with an ornamented tree in the lobby. It shall be divine. Sebastian, Günther, put on your cloaks and you’d better use your hoods, too. It’s snowing. Surely you’ll join us, Herr Drosselmeier?”
But Dirk made his swift good-byes and fled out into the night. Flakes seethed with pulmonary hiss along the boulevard. The family hung about at the street door, amused and slack-jawed at the flight of their guest. Deep in the bowels of the house, that infernal dog continued to publish his opinions with force and anger.
69.
At some later time, when Dirk had recovered from the sense of being an intruder upon their family hearth, he found himself in the small yellow salon with the Dutch tiled stove in the corner. Felix was poking ineptly at tobacco in a meerschaum. Dirk nursed a beaker of Lyonnais cognac. The boys roughhoused on the carpet behind the settee, sometimes pretending fisticuffs, sometimes settling down to act out scenes with their new toys. Dirk had brought them an Abyssinian and a Sultan. The boys didn’t quite know what the figures signified, but the Sultan seemed dominant because of his starry blue turban, so Günther made the Sultan attack with his head, like a bull with lowered horns, knocking the Abyssinian onto his back over and over. Sebastian was partly laughing and partly crying, being unable to launch a winning feint on behalf of the Abyssinian. When it got too much they threw the toys aside and pummeled each other.
“What I don’t understand, even now,” Felix was saying, “is why you haven’t married, Dirk.”
“Please, is this suitable—?”
“They don’t listen to adults. Why should they? Did you listen to your parents when you were their age?”
Dirk didn’t answer questions about his parents.
“I suppose what I mean,” said Felix, succeeding in getting the pipe to draw at last, “is whether your sympathies are so large as to make your choice difficult. I don’t pretend that everyone would be happy with a wife, but you adored your beloved Nastaran. And you were pestered by friendship with me. Is it that the two energies compete for your attention, and thus make it hard for you to settle?”
“The things you talk about! Why don’t you take up a musical instrument again? Channel some of that curiosity into melodic enquiry, which would irritate a little less.”
“Don’t count on that. I was quite an irritating musician. Am I offending?”
Dirk was happy to have become an acceptable guest in the Stahlbaum household. But he trod carefully. “The person who asks questions like yours always gets to choose the terms,” he said, and shrugged.
“What terms would you choose, were you to turn the question around to me?”
“That’s something I wouldn’t do. Is Ethelinda joining us?”
“In the smoking parlor? The cognac is going to your head. She says she is taking Otto von Blotto out for a stroll up and down the street. But really she’s showing off her new Parisian bonnet. Isn’t she fetching?”
She gave you these grand boys, this comfortable home, thought Dirk. She’s serene and secure and nearly lovely. You might have done a great deal worse.
“Or instead, perhaps you have no—appetites—at all,” continued Felix.
“That’s preposterous,” said Dirk. “I should like right now to knock your head off your shoulders, that’s the appetite I have.” The boys paused their own skirmishes at the sound of Dirk’s raised voice. He had surprised himself and tried to turn it into a bit of theatre. But Felix heard the note in his retort, and put his hand on Dirk’s knee, and poured an inch more cognac. The conversation turned to the possibilities for increased commercial wealth in the revived confederation of German states promised by the March revolution. Felix had every intention to play strategically with the liberal elements and shore up his investments. “My hope is to take possession of a home for the summer in the north—it has come down to me from my grandfather because his wife has died long ago and my miserly father doesn’t want to take it on. A place to which we can repair, as Kurt and Ethelinda have fallen out some time ago, and so we no longer can go to the schloss on the Bodensee.”
“About what did they fall out?” asked Dirk, glad for the change of subject. But it was Felix’s turn to indicate the presence of the boys, who had quietly been amassing a contingent of earlier gifts from Dirk—the two Cathay scholars, the Ukrainian milkmaid, the wide-hipped Mother Ginger with all her little babies that hid in her skirts. The world of toy was lined up along a curl in the Turkey carpet, listening to the grown-ups. The boys’ hands hovered.
At this moment Ethelinda came through and lost control of Otto von Blotto, who raced in and, this once, forgot to abuse Dirk and instead grabbed the new Sultan in his teeth and ran around the sofa, growling.
70.
Felix:
“We do eventually grow up.”
Felix:
“Are you—all—or nothing? More . . . or less?”
Felix:
“Sebastian, get down off Herr Drosselmeier’s lap; you’re too big for that kind of thing.”
Felix:
“I don’t know where childhood goes. Sometimes I remember . . . something. I wonder if you do.”
Felix:
“You so seldom answer me. Am I to be offended?”
Felix:
“Will no one s
hut that damn dog up?”
Felix:
“Someday it will be too late, Dirk.”
71.
One day, when it was too late, Dirk had found himself in a powder-blue and gilded salon, at a concert to honor the late Frederik Chopin. Though the sinewy, exhaustive explorations called the Nocturnes were still relatively new to the general public, the room was full. The selections were presented by an aesthete with expressive locks, a vampire who played with a violent agitation of his arms. Despite the melodrama of performance, the music itself could muscle up, oh yes, a power to shock.
To avoid losing the Chopin in the service of mere and selfish memory, Dirk struggled to follow the architecture of the piece. If Bach was music for the court and the church, Chopin was music for the bedchamber. Or the moonlit copse. If Bach had been Euclidean, as Felix once asserted, Chopin relied on a different rhetoric. Dirk had no reference for it. Dionysian? An opiated Dionysus.
A recurring spiral in the melodic line, first up but then corkscrewing back to lower registers, with turns and hesitations as languorous as the drip of rainwater from branch to leaf to upraised lips.
In listening to music Dirk usually tried to empty his mind of vapors and images. Tonight, however, the first three nocturnes returned Felix to him in ways it was hard to fathom. Dirk struggled to escape such particularities—how Felix had sometimes looked at him, quizzical, with a half-smile, the way a dog turns its head on its neck as if waiting the answer of an unasked question. What next?
He let the music unfold in his mind a certain apprehension that it took a little while to recognize. There is Felix, dropping out of the sky, tumbling from the basket of a hot-air balloon. (Do people come to us any other way, really?) I am on the ground, knocked out by the contact. Felix is on hands and knees, leaning over me, slapping me awake. What am I trying to say about this? This happened to me, it truly happened. Preposterous as it seems—it’s no more preposterous than anything else. And I remember it here, under the influence of Chopin. Life has made this experience a memory.
Without a memory, what does experience mean—or matter?
He thought of those poor invalids who had been dead and then somehow revived, and how often it had been said they were severed from their true nature. Maybe they had had their memories broken off, and so they weren’t truly alive, not the way others were.
But then memory could kill one—as it had done Nastaran.
At the height of outrageous curiosity Felix had once asked him about the eye-patch. “Behind that black circle, is your bad eye actually still there? You say you lost your eye—do you mean that actually? If you lost it, where is it?”
Of course Dirk hadn’t answered. The truth is, he didn’t know for sure. Maybe the falling tree in the woods had prodded his eye out the way a spoon dislodges a stone from an overripe cherry. Maybe the eye was rolling about in the Black Forest someplace, minding its own business, having experiences without memory.
Oh, the nonsense music could liberate from the wretched mind.
The otherness of it—the wordless significance.
The ’cello music assaulting him with beauty in the decommissioned chapel at the von Koenig schloss. The unplayed dotar in Nastaran’s bedchamber.
Chopin’s theme, a simple descending descant the first time round, articulated itself in the repeat with nuanced embellishment. It was music remembering itself. It meant something different, something more, to hear those simple phrases repeated so soon, qualified by chromatic variations. Clarifications.
Not redundancy, but a hypothesis about how consolation works. A second chance at getting it. A second chance at life.
72.
While Felix was still alive, Dirk visited the house known as Meritor only once. He remembered the circumstances the rest of his life, though, as a kind of coming home. If that sort of comparison wasn’t baseless at its heart.
The Stahlbaum family—its guests and assigns and lackeys—had packed themselves into three carriages. They’d spent the better part of a week on the road from Munich. They’d stopped at Nuremberg. Another night at Leipzig with its publishers, for all Dirk knew, still buying their paper stock from Herr Pfeiffer & Sons back in Meersburg. Then, alighting for several days in grandiose Berlin, they’d heard two terrific concerts.
The boys were bored at the long carriage hours but thrilled with the idea of travel. They were frantic to get to meet the sea. Ethelinda was equally enthusiastic. She had never been farther north than Berlin. Still, only Felix had yet seen the property. Had he promised them too much?
They came upon it toward the end of the sixth day. It sat at the knuckle of a high spit of land on the island of Rügen. At first, all closed up against the sun and winds, the three-story outpost looked as if it must have been built as a fortress against the Danes—or maybe, when the Danes held this region, by themselves as a fortress against others.
The proportion of window glass to stone façade was ungenerous to light. And the grey granite was hewn in larger blocks than a house usually required. The place had something of the air of a temple, or perhaps a banking establishment. But the channel beyond it was glistening, and all agreed the sobriety of the house counterpoised sensibly against the dash and impudence of the sea.
The parlors, with one broad door and a lot of small windows with shutters, looked out to the west toward the smaller island of Hiddensjö, in the Danish, or Hiddensee as the locals called it. If Sebastian and Günther climbed on the desk in the corner of the parlor and peered through the high window, they could spy the small stretch of open Baltic Sea that divided Hiddensee from a northerly hangnail of a promontory that curled around from Rügen.
Dirk chose a room at the top of the house, facing the north. Though he had misgivings about the force of the wind through the casements—misgivings that proved well founded on the first cold night—he concluded that the view of islands in light was worth the bother of shivering. Instantly he fell in love with one break, where water met sky. No intervening land to disturb the sense of everness. The pale dash of horizon between homeland and Hiddensee. Such, perhaps, is to be expected of one born in the steeps of Alpine vales. Claustrophobia becomes a characteristic of childhood.
Dirk would come to adore Meritor—the name that young Sebastian concocted out of meer and tor—sea-gate. The vivid broom bucking in the wind was lively and silly. And even on stormy days, the countryside near the ocean possessed more light than the brightest Munich days. Only when the fog bellied in, as it liked to do of a summer morning, did the house hunch to its stone knees and seem to be thwarted.
That first visit, Dirk found his way down the cliffs with Felix and the boys and the wretched Otto von Blotto. They meandered along the shore. The dog growled at every strand of seaweed he came across. The boys collected rocks and shells, and threw them seaward, trying, they said, to build a bridge of stone between Hiddensee and Rügen.
“Meritor was repurposed as a hotel, a sort of seehotel, I think,” said Felix. “But it failed. Until the roads are improved, it remains too far for the summer traveler.”
“It is lovely, but is it sensible to fall in love with a place so far from Munich?”
“Au contraire, I find it usefully distant from Munich concerns, all those eyes and opinions. My hope is that by next year we might live here all summer. People are starting to do this sort of thing, you know.”
“I should be sorry to see so little of you and your family for such a length of time.”
“You’d come, of course. That’s the idea.”
Dirk laughed. They linked arms against the wind. “You’re mad. I have a small shop. I can’t afford to close it for a season.”
“You can bring your tools and paints and grommets, your adzes and awls, and work here all summer. I’ll arrange a workbench for you. The boys will promise not to pester you.”
“The boys are never a bother. But it’s out of the question. I shall come to visit from time to time. Let that be enough between us.”
&n
bsp; Sebastian had found a stone shaped like a butter roll. With ferocious noise Otto von Blotto was trying to scare a dead fish back to life. Günther was paying no attention to either of them, dashing toward the teasing waves, dancing away before getting his toes soaked. Gulls came in from Sweden with all the Scandinavian news. The light seemed to have a long up-swung curl to it at horizon level, some trick of atmospherics.
They sat to admire the view. It was blindingly blue today. Then Felix shifted his seat to a rock behind Dirk, and clamped his knees about Dirk’s shoulders. As if Dirk were a ’cello. “I’ll change your mind,” said Felix. “Give me time.”
“Take all the time you need. My mind is a capricious beast, and you may not find it where you expect.”
“Haven’t I already learned that.”
They sat without speaking. The boys waved, and their father waved back. Dirk’s hands were clenched tightly, one packed into the other.
When they stood and prepared to turn back, they clung closer together. “Boys,” shouted Felix. “The wind is a monster. Keep back from those tidal pools or the North Wind will push you in, and your mother will have my head on a salver.”
“You’re right to worry,” said Dirk before he could stop himself. Nastaran at the edge of the jetty at midnight. He pushed past this. “What good boys. Do they always obey you so well?”
“Rarely. As soon as this new situation becomes commonplace to them, they will begin to break the rules. The nature of boys. I hope you will look after them, Dirk.”
“I—?”
“I mean, should anything ever happen to me.”
“Like what? Your getting abducted by a sea monster?” Dirk gave Felix a sudden shove with his shoulder, knocking Felix off balance. His knee went out and he sat down in the wet, pebbly sand. “Yes, the world is a treacherous place, Felix.”
“You reprobate. I’ll get you.” And they chased each other as far as the boys, and a little ahead. Meritor came into view around the curve of the bluff. From here they could see the castellated roofline facing the sea. Perhaps the place had housed cannon at some point.