Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

  “I counted him as a friend,” said Dirk. The only friend, actually.

  “And what are you, really, to my sister, from whom I will remain estranged for the rest of my days, it seems?”

  Dirk stood again, this time clasping his coat in business-like fashion. “I am a neighbor and a well-wisher of your nephews, Sebastian and Günther.”

  “I see she has named you godfather to the boys, and that should she die, you will be the one to raise them up.”

  Dirk said nothing. He hadn’t heard that item.

  “Godfather, is that what it’s called now. Frankly, I was surprised that Felix could claim to have fathered them. I took him for something of a washout with the gentler sex—indeed, initially I thought his false claim of foisting a child upon a country maiden was intended to bolster for him an unlikely reputation as a ladies’ man. That much I was happy to give to him. As a friend—of course.” Now Kurt von Koenig stood, too. “There’s no written reply to my sister. But I should be in your debt if you could carry my condolences to her on the death of her husband.”

  “I’m unequal to that task.”

  “I loved him, too, you understand.”

  “I shall tell your nephews you send appropriate greetings. They oughtn’t be tainted by the mistakes of their parents’ generation.”

  “Whom are they more like? Felix or Ethelinda?”

  “I never know how to answer a notion of impossible comparisons.”

  “I don’t imagine you want to meet my son, so you can tell Ethelinda what he is like? His name is Adolphus Wolfgang.”

  Dirk didn’t answer, just achieved the door before he turned around. “You might do me one favor. Do you know the whereabouts of an old doctor named Mesmer?”

  “If you mean the hypnotist, that tendentious human hypnagogue, he died years ago. Disgraced and made much fun of. Few speak of him any longer.”

  77.

  Dirk wasn’t surprised to learn from the second Frau Pfeiffer that Gerwig Pfeiffer had passed away. “But the boy still lives here, and he takes care of me as if I had give birth to him myself,” said Cordula, now a thickened old woman. “He’ll be along presently. Come in if you like, or stay out in the garden if the house gives you a case of jelly-stomach. But it’s too cold for me to sit here with you. I’ll send out a mug of hot cider. You’re certain you won’t come in?”

  He wouldn’t. The outside air, enough.

  No ghost of Nastaran had arisen here in the walled garden to welcome him or to affright. Such a terrible, sad absence. The Pfeiffer house was a tombstone standing on an old road that wanted to get somewhere else, but couldn’t—it petered out into fields. Behind it, the twin structure, the barn. Invisible from the street, Dirk realized now, but just as large. Just as real.

  Sheets of appearance hung to distract, to conceal.

  In this garden, once, walnuts had been strung on strings.

  Now the small orchard was falling apart through neglect. Large limbs lay on the ground. It was a battleground. No Florence Nightingale had been through to clear up the corpses. He couldn’t think what this might remind him of.

  He felt like a tall old ledger, an accounting book open to a page in midlife, but the sum of knowledge registered herein was slim, and the pages behind were scrawled over illegible, and those ahead empty.

  Someone arrived with a cup of cider, aromatic and steamy. It wasn’t Frau Pfeiffer the Next, but a solid tall woman about Dirk’s age, with good skin and grey hair.

  “So it is you,” she said. “I thought the old woman was floating in her mind.”

  “Frau—?” said Dirk, confused.

  She winced. “You don’t recognize me. I’m Berthilde.”

  He took the cup.

  “Tilda, the boys called me. Tillie.”

  He nodded, chagrined.

  “The laundress,” she prodded. “I was here the first year you arrived, and I stayed four or five years until my marriage. My husband has died.”

  “Condolences, of course…”

  “Don’t strain yourself, you. Not worth it. You never knew I was here. You had your eye on the first Frau Pfeiffer, and when she died you went blind. Did you really never know I was waiting all those years for you to look at me?”

  He took a sip, unable to confirm her suspicion or to lie.

  She shrugged. “Ah well. It’s not as if I want to be married again, so don’t act so terrified.”

  “This is a very excellent cider.”

  She had the good grace to laugh over her shoulder at that as she returned to the house.

  Nearly dozing in the chill, he started, and the cup dashed to the ground but didn’t break. A man was coming in the gate.

  “Only one person I know wears an eye-patch, but he is much younger than you are,” said Franz. “He doesn’t have grey at his temples.”

  “He does now.”

  “It’s shaking with cold at this hour.”

  “I wanted to wait here. I don’t want to come in.”

  “Well, we’re not going to bring supper into the garden at this time of year.”

  “I won’t stay. I just wanted to see you and your brother, and find out how you are.”

  “Doing all right. The trade is brisk. Increasing unity among the German nations is good for business. I’ve four stout men under my eye now, can you believe that? When once my father and you did the whole thing by yourselves?”

  “I did next to nothing, but you were too young to see that.”

  “A fine-grained crap of the family bull was I. Maybe you started out incompetent, but after Mutter died, you were indispensable. We remember. Gerwig couldn’t have kept the business together without your help. He really ought to have given you an interest in the trade.” Franz grinned, an old look from boyhood. “But as he didn’t do it in his day, I’m not about to break with family tradition. Look, let me put down my wares and relieve myself, and I’ll be back with two portions of ale. I won’t loiter here for long, I never could tolerate the wind off the lake at this time of year. My balls retract so fast they thump my kidneys. But I’ll stand with you over a stein.”

  Dirk watched Franz hump away. The current Pfeiffer tradesman was already thick in the middle. Where really did boyhood go, or childhood?

  He tried to grip the invisible thread that slipped by—

  Some sense of the parables, the loaves and the fishes, the consoling spirit of the dead mother in the ash tree—

  But it was like sifting a stream for its shadows. The sieve comes up wet and empty.

  Franz was back, carrying two portions of a tawny ale with a sour, gingerbready aroma. He stood against a stone wall and Dirk rested an elbow on the wooden gate. At their knees, the abandoned childhoods of young Franz and young Moritz still thrived. Ghosts with random twigs and bird feathers invisibly acted out the history of the world once again. Franz didn’t seem to mind, or perhaps notice.

  “Are you here on business?” asked Franz, after quaffing half his share.

  “Business done. Such as it was. Of no significance.” Dirk wasn’t sure if this was true, but in any case it was none of Franz’s affair. Franz made no claim on Dirk’s affections. He was more like the grown child of a long-dead friend than an actual intimate. Dirk couldn’t entirely recall why he had come.

  Franz was Nastaran’s grown son. That was why. Dirk tried to keep this impossible notion central in his thoughts (it was a blur of incandescence), but it kept winging away and alighting elsewhere. Franz the grown man looked so much more Teutonic than Persian. Nastaran, having left the world, perhaps had taken her half of Franz with her.

  “Our stepmother is still here. She’ll want to see you,” said Franz. “Won’t you come in and give her a thrill? A little vague now but she’ll recognize your grimace, and accept a rigid embrace for old time’s sake.”

  “I’ve already greeted her. Her grip still seemed steady to me.”

  “Well, it comes and goes. Have you married, have you a family?”

  “Have you?” r />
  “I’ve a maiden in mind. She’s just coming of age this year. If she’ll have me, we’ll wed in the spring.”

  Dirk finished his ale. He set the tankard upon the stone wall and said, “What about Moritz?”

  “Ach, Moritz,” said Franz. “Well, that’s not so happy a tale, is it.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “He couldn’t stay here, you know. It was too much for him. In the end we have put him in an asylum out the road toward Lindau. We visit him two or three times a year. You could go there if you liked.”

  “Oh, no, I could not,” said Dirk. His hand shook as he dropped it in his leather satchel. “Look, Franz, here. Take this to him, though. A present for me, from the past.” He brought out the old Nutcracker.

  Franz wouldn’t touch it. “He doesn’t need to go backward, Dirk. He isn’t made happy by memory. This thing cannot save him.”

  “You have it, then. A gift from me.”

  “You sound distressed,” said Franz. “A weaker man than I am would take this just to get rid of you, Dirk, and toss it in the fire as soon as you were gone. But I am better than that. I won’t take it either. All these years on, I don’t blame you for our mother’s death. All these years later. So many years later.” He finished his ale. “But I don’t credit you with saving her life, either.”

  78.

  He spent the night in Meersburg, in a cold room above a quiet stable. He thought about the lost childhoods of Franz and Moritz and then, inevitably, about his own.

  His clawed scraps of memory hardly seemed to signify a real life. Yet the more that the structures of his adult life failed, the stronger seemed the deep past. A life in the deep forest, that old man and old woman.

  Some story that they used to tell about a little lost forest, and its cantankerous pair of ambassadors—a lovely goddess in a green kirtle, an untrustworthy hunchbacked gnome of some sort with long sharp teeth. Dirk couldn’t remember how the story went.

  Though as he slipped into sleep, he came near to dreaming—an unusual experience, dreams for him being a rare abrasion against cold reality. Branches of great trees came raking down over him like the collapse of an entire hillside. A sense of urgency—not for his own safety, but for that of the woods. The rescue of the numinous world. It made no sense at all.

  The beer made him belch, and that woke him up. He arranged his thoughts a little more clearly for a moment. Mesmer and some folderol about an ancient forest of Delphi, severed from its sacred home by a tremor of the earth. Migrating for two or three thousand years to the north. Mesmer, thought Dirk, must have become enamored of those tales the Brothers Grimm had collected and published, with all their adventures carried out in the tremulous Bavarian woods. What a charlatan, foisting such a romantic tale upon a lost and sensitive young man such as himself.

  Having someone of whom to disapprove made Dirk calmer. He slept in steep shafts of dreamlessness.

  79.

  Before leaving Meersburg the next day Dirk Drosselmeier went to the doors of the Roman Catholic mother church and looked in. A stout older man in a mis-buttoned waistcoat, whose hair corkscrewed above his ears and jowls, was singing an astounding powerfully sweet melody, while seven musicians plunged their bows back and forth across the strings. The tears stood in Dirk’s eye in an automatic way, as without invitation tears will start from onions. He had no clear sense of sentiment, but he was wiping his face anyway.

  When they had paused to refer to their scores over some accident of atonality, the first violinist saw Dirk. “Ave Maria,” he said. “It does that to you, doesn’t it? But this rehearsal is closed. What are you doing here?”

  “I want to find the episcopal offices. I need to make an enquiry about a Protestant church in the region. I figured Rome keeps tabs on renegades and apostates.”

  The violinist pointed Dirk on his way, while the portly tenor mopped his brow and swore unbecomingly about pains in his knees and his back.

  Was music beautiful because it was full of mystery, Dirk wondered, or was it full of mystery because it was beautiful?

  A smug-looking cleric at a stand-up desk checked the registry of vicars. “Why, you are indeed in luck,” he said. “We are all less tendentious as we veer toward unification. A Reich eventually, no? Let me look. Well, it seems a certain Pfarrer Johannes is still installed at his position in the village of Achberg. If you are going that way, perhaps you could take him a message for us?”

  “Depends on the message,” said Dirk. “I don’t recall your parties were on speaking terms.”

  “These days, it’s all ‘God bless you and keep you, if you’re still alive,’” said the cleric, who was young. “Apparently, Pfarrer Johannes is poorly. But our Bishop would probably like to grace him with a greeting. It’s only good form. Have a seat and I’ll be back. Or would you rather make your devotions in the chapel?”

  “No.”

  The packet was eventually delivered with an ecclesiastical wax seal. I’ve become an adjunct of the House of Thurn und Taxis, thought Dirk; I’ll do nothing more with my life but carry messages back and forth. But just think: after all this time, a reply from the Roman Catholic Bishop. At last.

  He spent an hour or so finding out how he might hire space in a carriage heading northeast from Meersburg. A day later, for roads were better now, he had made it to the village last seen in his childhood.

  It had changed less than Meersburg or Munich. Indeed, he remembered his first approach to it, that pregnant maiden at the well early in the morning. Today, no one recognized him. He recognized no one, either. He’d never had a good eye for a resemblance.

  The old vicarage leaning up against the edge of the chapel was in need of repointing. A kitchen chimney seemed to have scattered bricks and stone into the herb yard. Otherwise the place looked much the same. A young man and woman were leaving the small porch, calling their good-byes. Betrotheds, perhaps, making arrangements for their nuptials. Dirk stood aside, glancing at the ground, as they came through the gate. Certain sorts of happiness made him feel aloof if not skeptical. They were too young to know how love went.

  They were too young, and he was too old. Or too—something.

  A housekeeper answered the door. “Rather late in the day for the old fellow to be receiving guests, and strangers at that,” she said reprovingly, but when she saw the seal of the Roman Catholic Bishop’s chancery upon the envelope she relented. “I’ll tell the Pfarrer you are come,” she said. “What’s the name, then?”

  “He knows me as Drosselmeier.”

  He was ushered into the room that, as he recalled, had been a sort of study. A bed was set up near the fireplace, floating like an island away from all the walls. Pfarrer Johannes was propped up upon pillows of swan’s down. Yellow his cheek, and pale his once ruddy lips, but his eyes were wide above the pince-nez.

  “It never is, it never could be you, and yet it is, and could be after all,” said Pfarrer Johannes Albrecht. “Come lean down and give me a kiss, dear boy. What took you so long?”

  “I got lost.”

  “I should say so. Let me look at you. Stand back. No, that’s too far back. My eyes are tyrants—they like the middle spot in the carpet. Yes, perfect. Oh, my. Dirk! Am I dying even faster than I thought, that you should answer one of my last prayers?”

  “I am no answer to a wish.” He pulled up a stool to the side of the bed. “What is wrong with you?”

  “I am eight thousand years old, give or take, and the Lord is tired of waiting for me. Saint Peter has parked his celestial char à bancs in the courtyard. Can’t you hear the horses snorting and pounding their hoofs in impatience?”

  So Pfarrer Johannes had, in old age, gone fantastical.

  Or perhaps he could hear the horses nickering there, after all.

  “I haven’t got long,” said the old man. “I don’t mean I am departing for heaven tonight—at least, I don’t feel that I am. But my strength doesn’t last, and you will find me nodding off just as you are about
to tell me how you kidnapped Napoleon and conquered Malta and made love to some pretty young wife of a hoighty family. Very von und zu. So speak quickly. What have you made of your life?”

  How to answer such a question.

  “A long road toward a retreating horizon,” he ventured. “Like everyone else’s.”

  “No horizon but heaven.”

  “That must be true for you, good father. But the rest of us aren’t so sure of our itineraries.”

  “Then you become your own destination, Dirk. That is what happens. As long as you are a person of conscience—of merit—one who makes the attempt—you head ever toward the geography of yourself. But I want the real map! Your own map in time, in days and years. Why did you never return? I was worried fair to desperation.”

  Brandishing the sealed greeting: “Here is a reply, after a fashion. The delivery of post is very slow in these parts.” They both laughed, and Dirk continued. “I was taken in as a houseboy of sorts. For a while. One thing led to another.”

  “Industry? Marriage? Family? Education?”

  “Well . . . none of that. Travel, though. I did travel widely. And now I live in Munich, and make toys.”

  “Toys!” Pfarrer Johannes wrinkled his lip. “I’d have thought you’d obey the injunction of Saint Paul and put away the things of a child.”

  “One does that when one has stopped being a child, as I recall the verse. So perhaps I’ve never stopped.”

  “Or you never started,” mused the old man. “You were sober as a little magistrate when you arrived. No wreathing smiles. No easy games and jokes like other boys.”

  “Forgive me for disappearing. I never had a good sense of direction of any sort.”

  “I was worried. You worried me. You should be whipped for causing an old man worry.” He relented. “Though I wasn’t as old then, was I? I did look for you. Did you know that?”