“Are they here in this room? Now?”
“You know if they are.”
He kept his eyes trained on her, didn’t turn left or right so as to avoid confirming or denying her apprehensions. “Shall I get you a glass of milk?”
“Did you ever meet a mouse? What do they want?”
He began to arrange a few of the figurines into a procession. “I knew a Nutcracker once who was the sworn enemy of the king of the mice.”
“Why?”
“The Nutcracker wanted to chop down a tree to get a golden walnut, but the king wouldn’t let him.”
“Why not?”
“Because the mice wanted the walnut for themselves. They were waiting for it to be ripe, so they could crack the shell open and eat the nut inside. They didn’t want to share. They’re quite greedy.”
“Why did the Nutcracker want the golden walnut?”
“I think it held a secret, but I don’t know which one. Do you?”
She closed her eyes to think about this and he began to hope she had fallen asleep. He tiptoed to the door, shushing Fritz, who was just back with another armload of tin grenadiers and Hussars. “Fritz, where is your father?”
“Mutter and Vater are in the yellow parlor with the tannenbaum. We aren’t allowed to go in until late tomorrow night. It’s Christmas Eve tomorrow, you know.”
“Oh, is it? And the Christ Child may bring you some gifts?”
“It’s possible.”
Drosselmeier found coyness in a young boy repellent. He excused himself and knocked on the door of the yellow parlor.
Sebastian and Clothilde and the downstairs maid were dressing a voluptuous balsam tree with laces, baubles, and candles. A few wrapped presents were laid below. Marzipan and gingerbread figures hung on silvered string, keeping company with small toys like drums, bells, other musical instruments. Drosselmeier cradled a small ’cello in his palm, then let it free. The tree wanted at least one golden walnut on a string. Well, tomorrow, soon enough.
“You’ll join us for the grand unveiling tomorrow evening?” pressed Clothilde.
“Are you having a serious problem with mice in the house?”
“No more this winter than any other,” said Sebastian.
“What an insult to a tree, don’t you think?” asked Drosselmeier. “I mean, to be severed at the ankle and dragged in and mocked like this.”
“This tree grew for a decade so it could be honored in death and give joy to the children. At least that’s how I like to think of it,” replied Clothilde. “We would not think of inviting forests into the house in Lyon when I was young, but I have come to admire the barbaric German custom.”
“It is so beautiful it makes me ill,” said Drosselmeier.
“Are you becoming sentimental, old godfather?” asked Sebastian. “We have enough of that between the two of us, under the circumstances. We rely on you to lend a certain crankiness to the proceedings. It’s not too early for a glass of Tokay, if you’re thirsty.”
“I have some work to finish up in the shop,” said Drosselmeier, and left the house. Only on the street, steeped in the cold clarity of snow-odor, could he identify the aromas he had left behind: the sap of a fir tree, its pungent slow blood; the lavender of soaps and camphor of blankets; the gingerbread; the dusty wood-mold smell that comes up from the floorboards in the winter; the reek of a cabbage being boiled senseless, with caraway and perhaps a touch of fennel seed.
He worked with wood and glue, a brush and a pot of gilt, on through most of the night, paying no attention to the mice. He’d long ago used up the blue of the sky—he’d called it Nastaran blue—from the pot he had once opened for her with a knife. But the very same wide-mouthed jug had made a good home for his brushes all these years.
88.
Christmas Eve. Drosselmeier closed down the workroom and drew fast the shutters. He fixed his cloak with fingers stiffened by labor, and he picked up his parcels. Most were smaller gifts, but one was large, so he hired a carriage to make his way through streets masked with snow grit.
He descended the carriage and paid the fare. When the wind dropped suddenly, he felt encased in invisible ice. He turned to the swept stairs of the Stahlbaum manse. Lamplight from between the swagged drapes at the front windows, like the limelights of theatre, turned the snow on windowsills to gold.
Entering, he shucked off his coat and sidled with the packages into the servants’ passage. He made his way to the yellow parlor, where Sebastian was lighting the candles on the tree with tapers.
“Clothilde is upstairs with them, keeping them calm until the clock strikes. Drosselmeier, you’ve outdone yourself. You’ll make them sick with glut.”
“I’m the godfather. I’m allowed. How is the little invalid?”
Sebastian didn’t answer.
Drosselmeier put his packages about. Holly decked the mantel. A fire hissed and ticked. “Is Fritz behaving, at least?”
“He’s worn out with trying to be decent. It’s too wearing on a boy. I shall be glad when the holidays are over.”
“Only children love the arresting weirdness of these days.”
Again, Sebastian kept his silence.
Drosselmeier pushed. He wanted to tire Sebastian into giving a different sort of answer. “Has she had more dreams about the mice?”
“Dear Godfather. I’m doing what I can to keep her comfortable. I don’t have the wherewithal to investigate the nonsense of her dreams.”
“Oh, well, then.” But now Drosselmeier was chastened. The poor father was sorely tried.
“Are we ready?” Having lit the last of the tapers, Sebastian trimmed the wicks of the oil lamps on the credenza. “Shall I call them in?” The sounds of the impatient children, now in the antechamber, were building.
“One last thing.” Drosselmeier finished arranging his great gift on a low table. He had built it in four pieces for easier transport, and affixed it with tabs, small bolts, braces. A broad assemblage of a fairy-tale palace, with turrets and a drawbridge and a central courtyard. Drosselmeier had painted it in shades of buttercream with blue shadows and red tile roofs, and he’d hidden a music box in the empty space of the chapel. A key for winding the music fit into a slot in the back of the chapel. He’d made a hiding place for the key in a walnut that he’d parted with a small-toothed saw. Pried its halves apart with an awl, and then reattached them with a small brass hinge with tiny screws. The whole thing was painted with gold leaf and fitted with string.
Drosselmeier wound the music box. It made a few hesitant plinks, then settled into a merry tune not unfit for dancing. If tin soldiers and wooden figurines might be so moved as to dance. Satisfied, Drosselmeier tucked the little key into the hollowed-out golden walnut shell. He hung the secret among the other marvels and baubles festooning the tannenbaum, including a dozen other golden walnuts on strings. Decoys.
“I think you’ve outdone yourself, Drosselmeier,” said Sebastian with just a hint of disapproval.
“Let them enter while the music is playing; it runs down in just a few moments.”
Beginning to warm to the drama of it, Sebastian slid open the doors. Fritz came tiptoeing forward, eyes wide with greed and adoration. Clothilde was behind him, carrying Klara. The girl’s head was too heavy to lift off her mother’s shoulder, so Clothilde rotated, giving Klara access to the view. The child smiled before putting her thumb back in her mouth.
“Oh, a castle!” cried Fritz, finally letting the clue of music distract him from the balm and seduction of candlelight. At this Klara tried to straighten up. Her mother supported her back. “It has little figures in the windows, and they’re moving!” cried Klara.
“They’re at their own Christmas feast. They don’t know about ours. They don’t know we are watching. Luckily they are very polite and they cannot be embarrassed. They are moved by music,” said Drosselmeier.
“Do they fight?” asked Fritz. “You may not know this, but we’re in desperate need of reinforcements.”
/> “I doubt they fight, but I do think they dance extremely well,” commented the godfather, though as the music slowed down, the dancers began to flag, too. Fritz tried to poke the residents through the unglassed windows. “Don’t, you’ll dislodge them from their tracks, and it’ll be nearly impossible to reestablish them. They’ll spend their lives lying on the floor, unable to see out the windows.”
“Stupid peasants if all they can do is dance.”
“It’s a holiday, not a military call to arms.”
“How do we get them to dance again?”
“Ah, there is magic in this music, but you must find the key. It’s not far. Be patient. It will not stay hidden for long. Magic never does.”
Fritz lost interest at once and began to root among the other gifts. Clothilde settled her daughter on the settee. They began to ferry small wrapped presents to her. Klara was too listless to work the wrappings, so her mother helped her but let Klara finger out the little treasures one by one.
A small wooden cat bought from some toy maker other than her godfather. “I think that creature has little personality,” observed Drosselmeier coolly. Despite being under the weather, Klara had the good sense to drop it on the floor.
A bear wearing a bishop’s mitre.
A fisherwoman with a net. Under her shawl she had a fish face.
“A person from Spain?” asked Klara of a small carved señora featuring a real scrap of lace as her mantilla.
“Only one, I didn’t have time to make her a lover. I hope she won’t be lonely.”
“She looks nice. She will like everyone else.”
“But can a Spanish lady talk to the Russian men and the Chinese rice farmers? I am never sure if they can talk together.”
“Of course they do, Godfather. They speak the same language.”
“Not Spanish or Russian? Or Mandarin?”
“No—it’s the language of Toy.”
“Oh.”
“Children speak it, too, so that is convenient,” said Klara.
“Don’t get excited,” said her mother. “It’ll wear you out. Fritz, have you something to share?”
Fritz had made some drawings as presents for his parents and sister and godfather. His gift to Drosselmeier showed a regiment of sclerotic soldiers with raised bayonets, each one apparently ready to drive his weapon into the skull of the man standing in line in front of him, except the lead soldier, who was bravely facing down a monster of imprecise species. “There’s about to be a bloodbath,” said Drosselmeier. “I admire the courage of the league of men and also their uncanny resemblance. Identical quadruplets, perhaps? But tell me, dear Fritz, is this enemy a lion shorn of its mane, or perhaps a wild horse having a difficult day? Having left its eye-patch at home? That one eye is immense. Compelling.”
“It’s a spy for the King of the Mice.” Fritz was offended, but not very. “Can’t you see his mouse tail?”
“Beg pardon. A magnificent specimen.”
“I did a better one for Klara,” he admitted. “This one was a little messy. You see the last soldier’s feet are on backward. I forgot by the time I got to the knees and there was no room to make them go forward.”
“All the better for running back to camp and calling for reinforcements,” said his godfather.
“Mine has a very good King Mouse.” Klara spoke more vividly than she’d done so far. She leaned forward to show her godfather.
“Really, you’re making quite much of nonsense,” murmured Clothilde to all of them, but Drosselmeier arranged the paper at a distance where viewing could be clearest.
“Now, this is quite a success, I agree,” said Drosselmeier. “Why seven heads?”
“Because he’s the King,” said Klara. “Everybody knows that.”
“I was practicing heads, but they look pretty good all together, no?” whispered Fritz to Drosselmeier.
“That’s what the King looks like,” insisted Klara.
“And mine is . . . a lovely flower,” said Clothilde, with motherly insincerity.
“You explain mine,” said Sebastian, holding up a muddle for all to see.
“I didn’t get to finish,” said his son.
“I see. A fine study of procrastination, and I shall treasure it.”
“What is going to happen in the battle?” asked Drosselmeier, “or has it already happened?”
“It’s happening tonight,” said Klara.
“What are they fighting over?”
“Dirk, please. It’s Christmas Eve,” said Clothilde, but her daughter was looking around the room, trying to make sense of the question.
“It must be the tree,” she said. Dirk felt the wind from outside come up through the sleeves of his coat somehow, as if he were catching Klara’s fever.
“The tree is very beautiful, I agree,” he said, “but mice don’t live in a tree. Why do they want it?”
“The tree is hung with walnuts,” she said. “Walnuts are good for eating—and the mice are hungry during the wintertime. Snow on the ground. They have to come indoors.”
“I suppose so. And the King of the Mice has seven mouths to feed, all his own.”
“But you need walnuts to plant other trees, too. Walnuts are seeds, aren’t they? They grow in trees.”
“We need seeds to grow trees; that’s true.”
“The toys live in the tannenbaum, because it’s Christmas and the tree is magic now. If the mice win and swarm the tree, over-run it—how horrible, it will become brown and die. But the toys need it. So they will fight to the death to save their own home. Look at so many of them hanging on strings there! It’s their home.”
“I insist,” said Clothilde at last in a voice that could not be gainsaid. But she needn’t have worried as far as Drosselmeier was concerned. He was standing, suddenly feeling frail, and he shambled from the room, knocking against the doorsill as he went.
89.
Drosselmeier knew that at the far end of the long black-and-white-tiled atrium, toward the back of the Stahlbaum house, a set of steps descended to a pair of double doors opening into the garden. Sometimes in the early summer, before the family left for Meritor, Clothilde would invite friends over and serve hock and strawberries under the lindens. It was a bit of a French garden, the way the linden trees were planted in a box formation, all sixteen slim trunks pruned to rise like pillars, branches joining overhead. Drosselmeier was fond of linden. When he did carvings of figurines, linden wood proved supple, accommodating. He knew that no less than Grinling Gibbons had formed linden wood into all sorts of delicacies, as the wood could mimic the details of genuine botany.
Tonight, however, Drosselmeier was more aware of the balsams beyond the stately center of the garden, those that grew up against the stone walls that edged the property. Shaggier than those firs whose limbs lifted upward like the arms of a candelabra or menorah. The snow, which had kept falling since Drosselmeier had arrived with his presents, weighed down the branches of these balsam trees like thatch, turning them into the heaped, furred folds of somnolent woodland animals sleeping on their massive feet.
Breasting the margin on the right side of the garden, being overtaken by growing trees, stood a stone pedestal. Upon it capered a satyr or Caliban of some sort, his leer less erotic than furrowed with worry. Opposite him, through the formal grove on the other side of the garden, a twin pediment featured something like a dryad. At this hour, the stone was black and her filmy garments a sort of nubbly white, but Drosselmeier knew she was usually greened with a light moss, hers being a north-facing prospect.
For the first time, Drosselmeier wondered if poor lost Felix had installed these statues out of some vague homage to the silly story Drosselmeier could now barely remember. At any rate, the stone characters had been here forever, looking out season after season at Sebastian and Günther as they grew, and now at Klara and Fritz. The eternal lusty youth, the eternal maiden. Keats again: “For ever panting and for ever young.”
Without his coat, no hat on his
thinning pate, in his dainty dancing shoes, Drosselmeier left footprints on the shallow stone steps and descended to enter, and pass through, the chamber of lindens. He reached the margin of fir trees beyond. There was no doubt that the Stahlbaum house was behind him where he’d left it, rising its shoulders to the equal of its neighbors. But the sense of the house was gone. The trees in front of him shrouded the world. It was as if they met behind him as water does when you wade drunkenly into the sea.
One day he would finish the job of dying he’d begun in childhood.
He put his hands over his face and leaned into the arms of the trees, trying to push among them as if there was someplace to arrive beyond—someplace other than the stone wall of the garden. In this nighttime, the trees in their white lace looked less umber and forest green than they did black, as if they were inked approximations of trees. But they wouldn’t let him in. They linked their limbs against him. He lost the balance of his feet and leaned into them. Their arms wouldn’t let him fall to the ground, but they wouldn’t enfold him either.
Perhaps he murmured Felix? or maybe he just thought it. So Godfather Drosselmeier has finally grown old enough to learn how to be lonely.
It wasn’t Clothilde or Sebastian who brought him around, but little Fritz, who had dampened his own stockings to come tug on Drosselmeier’s sleeve. “You’ve missed the best surprise,” he said in an aggrieved way. “Klara has found a box with a Nutcracker in it.”
90.
“But where did he come from?” asked Klara.
“He was once a handsome young boy,” said Drosselmeier, “but he didn’t find love in time, and this is what happens to some of us.”
“Can he really crack nuts?” asked Fritz, and dove around the room to various crystal dishes. But they were filled with softly yielding marzipan fruits.
“Why is he so ugly?” asked Klara.
Drosselmeier thought about that. “He was going to marry your doll, Pirlipat, when he was a very young and handsome prince.”
“Even though the Mouse Queen bit her and her head went limp?”