“Of course not. How could I?”
“I hired a fellow from the precinct to go out the road toward Meersburg and see if anyone had word of a lost boy. Someone had seen you, but no one knew which path you might have taken.”
Dirk shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”
“You were my responsibility. The good Lord had deemed it so. I had failed you by sending you out into the snares of the world. How happy I am that you were not eaten by more bears!” He began to cry, and then suddenly slept for a moment or two. With closed eyelids, the brightness in the old fellow’s face faded. He looked like a toy Dirk might make out of starch-stiffened old linen.
Shaking himself awake after a bit, the old man seemed surprised to see Dirk still there. “The boy. You. I also sent someone to go to look for your folk. The woodcutter. Have I told you that yet?”
“The woodcutter.”
“Right. Those people you used to call the old man and the old woman. In the forest. I thought you might’ve gone back there.”
“The old man and the old woman. But not my parents. I was a foundling.”
“They weren’t old as all that, according to report. If they were the right people. The man was still alive. He walked with a limp and a stout cane of sorts. His sister was dead.”
“His sister?”
“One of the sins of Leviticus, I fear. Perhaps. ‘Neither should any man approach a close relative to uncover nakedness; I am the LORD.’ I rarely preached on that verse. I thought it was self-evident. Anyway, the sister died of consumption apparently. The woodcutter showed my agent a grave with a stone in which the woodcutter had crudely carved her name.”
“I didn’t know them by name.”
“If I knew his name, I’ve forgotten it. It’s amazing what leaks out of my memory and what stays put. I can’t figure out the method in it. But I remember her name. Gretel, she was. His sister.”
“Perhaps they weren’t the same people,” said Dirk, standing.
The old man was awake enough, alive enough still to hear the tonal change in Dirk’s voice. The cleric stopped speaking for a moment. His eyes closed. Maybe he was praying. Dampness on his cheek. “Perhaps not. One woodcutter is much like the next. Anyway it doesn’t matter now. You’ve come home.”
“I’m not home. I’ve never really been home. And I’m leaving, Pfarrer Johannes.” He had to get out of the place. He leaned down and embraced the old man as gently as he could. “Don’t save me a place in heaven, Pfarrer. There isn’t enough room there for someone like me.”
“I reserve the right to petition for anyone I want. I can be persuasive. Just ask my flock. But Dirk? My blessing.” He raised a hand about an inch off his chest and muttered under his breath, concluding, “My blessing, and also my advice. Spend what you have, give it away, Dirk. All, all away. The only chance to replenish yourself is to use up what you are given. It’s called redemption in some circles.”
Dirk took this to heart, though he thought better of offering the old cleric the battered Nutcracker as a memento. Pfarrer Johannes had fallen asleep again, and the housekeeper was at the doorway, tutting and beckoning. “You won’t stay for a bite,” she whispered declaratively.
“No.”
“Ach. I thought not.”
And then he was on his way back to Munich, a smaller person once again, though perhaps a slightly truer one.
Part Three
The Story of the Nutcracker and the Mouse King
80.
Ethelinda survived her husband by nearly two decades. In those years, Drosselmeier became her closest companion and support. He spent every summer with her and the boys at Meritor on the Baltic. The boys were devoted to him until they grew too old to find his games diverting.
Sometimes he wondered if he’d ever given them the kind of organized attention they deserved. After they were grown, he conceded that he’d often muddled up Günther and Sebastian Stahlbaum, those doughty bürgerlichs, with Franz and Moritz Pfeiffer, the mixed-blood sons of a small-town merchant. None of the boys were alike at all, if he admitted the testing of his memories. On the sidelines of the tiresome business of his life, they’d seemed little more than interchangeable pairs of boys.
That fairy godmother of Cinderella must have learned her trade at a better establishment than Drosselmeier did. He’d been blind to the boys in more than one eye. In short, he’d failed them all, godfather or no.
To make up the loss of income from summer months and to occupy himself during long afternoons, he took up clock repair. He developed a touch and, when back in Munich, began to build clockwork into a line of increasingly complicated toys—though simple anonymous dolls and armies of perfectly matched soldiers made up the better part of his income.
In all those years with the widow, never any question of marriage. During his more rueful moments he imagined that Ethelinda kept him around in order to boast of ownership of her Felix even after his death. But Drosselmeier learned to avoid that path to desolation. Ethelinda did have superior claim, after all. And, though perhaps clueless, Drosselmeier wasn’t absent from the boys even when they’d grown from lumpy kids playing games of mermaid and Poseidon and sea snake at the tidal pools—fashioned from driftwood just so!—into sleek male princes, attracting the gazes of fräuleins. He stood up for young Sebastian when he married a sober mademoiselle from Lyon. Her name was Clothilde. She had a high forehead and a tendency to be confident. She tolerated Drosselmeier with a philosophical neutrality.
In time, Ethelinda followed her husband to the grave. Neither her brother, Kurt, nor anyone from that side of the family bothered to attend the services. The son, Sebastian, found their absence something of a mercy. The other Stahlbaum boy, Günther, couldn’t contribute to the obsequies either, as he had moved to someplace across the ocean known as Ohio.
Sebastian brought his bride to Meritor. The spare, windblown terrain reminded her of summers spent on the Frisian coast. Clothilde had not enjoyed those summers, and Meritor was not a great success with her. When she became pregnant with her first child, she claimed the prerogative to cancel the annual trip. She wanted to christen the first child Alphonse, but Sebastian demanded a more Teutonic name, so he became Fritz. Four years later, when a daughter was born, Clothilde thought she had prevailed by insisting on Marie-Claire. Yes, Marie-Claire at the baptismal font—Drosselmeier weaseled into the role of actual godfather in both instances by dint not of faith but of his provenance with Pfarrer Johannes Albrecht—as the water rippled over the child’s pale pink brow. As she grew, German custom won through, and the child became popularly known as Klara.
81.
Drosselmeier found, as he aged and stiffened, that he was becoming more interested in Hellenic matters. To the extent that he remembered the bizarre imaginings of his youth, they became entwined with what he was reading about the pan-Athenian festival. Evidence of which had been carved into eternity in the stones of the Parthenon, long ago removed to London and now displayed free of charge in the British Museum. The fuss those marbles had engendered had only grown these fifty years since. Wealthier Germans were traveling to Athens to see for themselves.
Drosselmeier read Homer in translation. He remembered something that Felix had said once about Athena being the model for the fairy godmother who had become, by now, not only a stock figure in tales popularized by Grimm, but also a personage abducted and pressed into service, in one form or another, by the Danish fabulist Hans Christian Andersen. The Athena/godmother seemed to be everywhere in stories. Wasn’t that godlike of her? Always in disguise, like Christ in the urine-stained beggar beyond the newsstand. Like Elijah at the supper table, usually figured as a stranger with a hood over his brooding eyes.
In certain hours of the dawn Drosselmeier might remember clearly the woman in a green kirtle, her auburn hair bound only lightly with a band of hammered copper leaves. Try as he might, he couldn’t conflate her with any Renaissance Madonna he’d ever seen, nor with the wasp-eyed or vinegary portraits of
intelligent northern women by Memling and Dürer and the like. The sylph was more quicksilver, harder to interpret. Whether she might be virginal or a harlot, Drosselmeier had no idea. As the morning gloom dissipated through his drapes, which fell in volutes like those carved into columns of the neoclassical architecture of Munich, the revenant occasionally fixed him with a plaintive glare. Or accusatory. He was glad when she began to dissolve. A morning coffee rudely finished her off.
The other one, which he had finally come around to calling Pan, that stumpy little grinning demon—he thought of Pan more often. Pan seemed to gleam through the eyes of the old Nutcracker, which by now Drosselmeier wouldn’t sell even if he were asked. Though that had never happened. The Nutcracker stood by himself on a shelf behind the counter, in pride of place. Sometimes he seemed to leer, or mock; other times his look suggestive of wisdom, even charity.
How many times Drosselmeier had tried to give away the Nutcracker, and none would have it. It might as well be Drosselmeier’s doppelgänger, a toy weight around his neck. He felt he would have to get rid of it before he died. He wasn’t sure why. In an Andersen tale, the old toy would be thrown on the fire, and the smoke from its immolation would wreathe the brow of the green goddess. Whoever she was. But though Drosselmeier believed in stories—in their power, that is—he couldn’t place himself at the center of any of them. He had no standing.
Finally deciding the time had come to go to Athens, and perhaps even dare an overland trip to Delphi, for—for reasons he couldn’t name—Drosselmeier made his way to an establishment in the arcade where tickets could be booked. Trains from Munich to Vienna to Trieste. Passage on a steamer from Trieste down the Illyrian coast, or Dalmatia, and around the Peloponnese into the fabled Aegean. Alighting at Piraeus. Waiting for the clerk to copy the details in a ledger, Drosselmeier dreamed of resinous light and recited lines to himself. By now he could read enough in English to appreciate something of Keats. “Of thee I hear and of the Cyclades . . .” and “Aye on the shores of darkness there is light, / And precipices show untrodden green.”
Then, feeling a levity of being he hadn’t imagined possible, he lifted off the top step of the firm’s threshold and misplaced his foot coming down. He told the doctor a bird had flown in his face. Was it a bird, or the shadow of a hesitation? Its wings had made a protesting wind. He fell and broke a bone or two, and had to cancel his ticket. He took to relying on the imp-headed cane for balance. Travel to Greece was impossible. Indeed, getting back to Meritor this summer—for Clothilde had finally been bullied into returning—was itself going to propose a problem. In the end, he had to do without both the sunny Aegean and the cloudy Baltic.
Through this period of waiting—waiting for what, he didn’t know—the question of green returned to him. Perhaps he was going mad in the way the elderly sometimes did. The Bavarian custom of garlanding the household with balsam, of sawing down a pine tree and erecting it in a parlor with candles and ornaments of all sorts—it thrilled him every Christmastide with increasing fervor. Once, when grief for his misspent youth had been washed down with too much Riesling at the table of the current generation of Stahlbaums, he remembered the Little Lost Forest. Sebastian hadn’t allowed Drosselmeier to walk home in this condition, and had sent for the carriage. Drosselmeier’s head was operating on a set of fulcrums at odds with his spine and hips. He tried to settle his mind and his stomach by watching the street lamps. They seemed lost in arms of greenery. What did the sacred grove want? What did it need? What was he to do about it?
By the time he was home and had surrendered his dinner to the water closet, the burning question once again retired. He could think only this: how frightful that visions so rarely come intact and coherent. Their nature is to be obscure. Fragmented, maddeningly contradictory. It provides the work of a lifetime, at least for those poor souls afflicted with such sight, to puzzle out their meaning. No wonder the Saint Ambroses and Saint Jeromes of the world went off to their caves and steles.
What the sacred grove was missing was a population. Not of gods, but of the ambassadors of gods. Those who, through need, call the deities into being. The Odysseuses returning home to Ithaka, the Cinderellas in the ashes. The Persian poet naming the Divine as his lover. If Drosselmeier knew this, he knew it only in his deepest sleep, that sleep closest to death itself. He remembered nothing of this in the mornings, even on lightless mornings when the goddess implored him wordlessly.
He spent his life making toys. There is that. But what of it?
82.
But it is true that once or twice, when he saw the sloe-eyed damsel in the corners of his waking mind, he began to wonder why she so often recurred to him. He had had interest in women once upon a time, or thought he had, but then that had seemed to evaporate. Nothing much had replaced it. Felix had been, oh, an ideal of a friend, perhaps. The longer he insisted on remaining dead, the more a mystery Felix became.
Sebastian and Clothilde and their children stood in as Drosselmeier’s family. They weren’t replacing anyone—there was no one to replace. Nastaran Pfeiffer as once was—Drosselmeier found thoughts of her more fleeting, and less welcome, than those of the evanescent dryad. The Pythia as he’d sometimes called her.
Of all the figures he carved for a new generation of Stahlbaum children, Fritz and Klara, he avoided Persians. Young Fritz paid little attention these days to anything but the military, which now could be bought in sets of ten or a dozen. Identical blunt-faced orderlies born industrially, in pressed metal molds. Drosselmeier’s more delicate and individualized figures were reserved as gifts for Klara. A Russian princess in a painted wooden cloak. A Cleopatra in Egyptian blue. A charming family of pigs in graduated heights that stood on hind legs and wore nothing but pince-nezs, all of them, except the very smallest, who with a potbelly and a sour expression stood looking down and sucking her cloven hoof.
Klara: “How do toys think?”
Drosselmeier waited for her to answer her own question. She usually did if he kept silent. She concluded:
“They listen to us and learn to make guesses.”
Then, using his clockwork prowess, he came up with a new Mother Ginger. This variant possessed a real cloth skirt hemmed with a tight lead hoop that, when a button shaped like a bow was pressed in the small of her back, sprang open, not an indecent amount, to reveal a few human children huddled therein. They were thick, dwarflike. Drosselmeier found it interesting that though the overall effect was among his best, it was compromised because he was so poor at doing children. Barbarians, animals, imaginary creatures—all came to life under his set of knives more easily than that most exotic of beings, the local child.
83.
Klara, though, adored Mother Ginger and didn’t seem to mind that her children looked like trolls. “She is my favorite,” said Klara, climbing up on Drosselmeier’s lap the better to handle the bow and open the skirt. She moved the lumpy children in and out, and pulled off the petals of a rose in a nearby vase so the children could have sheets to cover them. Under their crimson snugs they resembled chunks of beetroot. “Does Mother Ginger look much like your mother?”
“I have no mother,” said Drosselmeier.
“Everyone has a mother or they can’t be alive. It’s not allowed.”
“I never claimed to obey the rules. Do you think Mother Ginger looks too old to have these children?”
“She looks old enough to have some more. I wish our Mutter would have a child. I want a baby to rock to sleep and to boss around.”
“You’ll have your own baby soon enough.” For Drosselmeier, time seemed to be moving more swiftly now. “Don’t hurry it.”
“Would it be too rude if the pig family could live in Mother Ginger’s skirt, too?”
“The children might pull the tails of the pigs. The pigs would squeal, and Mother Ginger, what would she do then?”
“She would open her skirt and send them all out to play and scream until they could learn to mind their manners. She would be used
to that.”
“What would Mother Ginger do while her children and pigs were out playing?”
“Take off her skirt and lie down. It looks very heavy and tiresome.”
“Ach, stop that, Klara. The dress doesn’t come off. It’s fastened at the waist, see? You’ll tear it.”
“But I mustn’t ever lie down in my good outfit.”
“Mother Ginger is a strong woman. She doesn’t need to lie down. She just goes for long healthful walks.”
“Perhaps she picks up stray dogs and cats under her skirts. Or like that seal we saw once at Meritor, remember?”
“A seal might make an unpleasant mess of Mother Ginger’s costume. Not to mention the smell.”
But smells meant nothing to children, and Klara seemed delighted by the idea, so the next time Drosselmeier came for dinner he brought a set of infantry with bayonets for Fritz, crudely painted, and a seal with a dropsical moustache to join Mother Ginger’s family. Drosselmeier found Klara to be formal and grateful, but he suspected she really didn’t care for the seal after all, for it got lost in short order and was never seen again.
84.
When Fritz and Klara played together, Fritz took the lead and Klara was quiet. If her brother happened to be out of the room, however, Klara spoke to her Godfather Drosselmeier as if in a language only the two of them understood.
Once when she was lying on the carpet with a wooden cat in one hand and a wooden dog in the other, she got tired making them chase each other or dance with each other or stand one upon the other. She rolled onto her back and held them both up and looked at them through a squint-eye.
“They are getting tired,” she said, yawning.
“What should they do?”
“They sleep in an eggshell,” she countered, “when the egg has gone out to take the air.”