Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

  “Oh, is that what happened? Ach: But even the ugly deserve rescue. He was going to rescue her. He was a handsome young prince and he searched the wide world until he found a tree with a magic walnut hanging on it, called Krakatuk, which would restore her to her health and vigor. But before he could give it to her, he tripped over backward and dropped it, and a curse caused him to turn old and wooden. So then Pirlipat wouldn’t marry him, and sent him away.”

  “I never liked her very much. She’s upstairs under the bed. She can’t come down tonight. Is the Nutcracker really old or does he only look old?”

  “Nobody is ever really old,” said Drosselmeier.

  “Aha!” cried Fritz. “I found it! Krakatuk! Among the other walnuts!”

  He was turning from the tannenbaum. His clever eyes had scissored their glance more quickly than fever-sullen Klara could do. The golden walnut with the minuscule gold hinges and clasp mechanism sat in his palm like a glowing lump of coal, a deified strawberry.

  “Ah, you’re ahead of yourself.” Drosselmeier tried not to sound cross. Klara became so excited she began to cough. Both her godfather and her parents turned to her in worry, Clothilde lifting a cloth to Klara’s mouth. While their attention was diverted, Fritz lunged for the old Nutcracker and shoved the golden walnut in his mouth. Drosselmeier pivoted in horror at the sound of the crack. The beautiful walnut was spoiled, its halves rolling away on the floor. The secret key hung on its red thread from a splinter of wood of the Nutcracker’s jaw, which dragged at a dreadful angle, as if he had suffered a fit. The latest thrush feather, its rachis broken, had fallen out to the carpet.

  Klara’s coughing was now fueled by anger and panic. She couldn’t stop herself. Drosselmeier stood at once and led Fritz by the hand out of the room, mastering an impulse to give the boy a swift slap. The sound of coughing followed them and could be heard behind the closed doors.

  91.

  Clothilde bundled Klara upstairs and organized a mustard-plaster for her chest while Sebastian ushered Drosselmeier, Fritz, and a few elderly neighbors and business associates into the dining chamber. The family had outdone itself with festivity. The food was ornate in the French style, and some of the adornments to the table were edible. The elderly ladies cooed over Fritz and lowered their lorgnettes to regard Drosselmeier behind his eye-patch. As they roped him into conversation he realized that they weren’t his seniors but his peers. One of them had hairs upon her chin and another wore a shade of puce so revolting that it put Drosselmeier off his meal.

  Without Klara at the table, time taken for a holiday meal seemed pointless.

  Fritz was allowed to march new soldiers up and down the napery until, wreathed in apologies, Clothilde finally arrived and took her seat. She waved the soup away and plunged into the fish. “But how is she feeling?” asked Drosselmeier when, for a blessed moment, all the other table guests were involved in chatter.

  “She will be better for a good night’s sleep. Too much excitement, I fear,” said Clothilde with a faint air of censure.

  “I’ll offer my good evenings to the guests after the main course, and forgo the pudding, and I’ll slip upstairs,” he said.

  “I cannot sanction that.”

  “I am her godfather. It is my place.”

  To this Clothilde had no reply, and she turned to the guest at her right.

  The snow fell upon the lindens, upon the Pan and the Pythia, or the Bacchus and the Athena, or the gnome and the goddess, whoever in heaven or hell they might be. The dark forest beyond the arithmetic of garden leaned in like an army circling the house at night, waiting for all the lights to be extinguished. It came down, merely, to this: Can a child be saved?

  “I shall come back in the morning with a small pot of glue, and set up the Nutcracker’s jaw. He shall be right as rain by this time tomorrow,” said Drosselmeier to Fritz. “But for tonight, I’ll bind it with one of Klara’s ribbons to keep the wood from splitting further. That was a silly thing for you to do, you know.”

  “What is the key for?” asked the boy with shocking lack of penitence.

  “There are two keyholes in the back of the fairy castle. The key fits in both. Inserted in the top keyhole, the key winds up the music. But if you put it in the bottom keyhole, the key unlocks the castle itself. Like the golden walnut in which it was hidden, the castle itself is hinged. The buildings around its courtyard can open their arms to make a large platz. A whole kingdom making a hug.”

  “For soldiers to march in!”

  “Yes, I suppose, and also all the figures I have made for you over the years. The animals, and Mother Ginger, and the capering Arabian nomads and the Kings of Sheba and the merchants of Cathay and the Ukrainian peasants. They all have a home in the fairy castle.” He looked about. “It is like this dining table at a holiday. Everyone is welcome.”

  “Even the boring old ladies,” murmured Fritz.

  “No one is left out. Where is the key now?”

  “Papi locked it in the glass-fronted cupboard. He was angry at me for ruining your gift. Nothing is going right tonight. Klara is sick, and the mice are frightening her. I think they are planning an attack.”

  “A good thing you have so many new soldiers to help defend the castle.”

  “But the key is locked up, and I can’t get it. And so we can’t open the castle to let the others rush in for protection during the battle.”

  “The toys can help in the battle.”

  “Mother Ginger? I doubt it!”

  “Never underestimate the value of a mother in wartime. She has the most to fight for.”

  Fritz thrust his lower lip forward, unconvinced. “What do you have to fight for?”

  “I can’t sit here and have stupid conversations like this,” he replied, and pushed back his chair. The old woman sitting across from Drosselmeier thought he was talking to her, and she stuck out her tongue at him.

  92.

  Though he knew Clothilde would be vexed, Drosselmeier made his way across the black-and-white tiles and mounted the steps at the back of the atrium. He paused for breath at the first landing. The housekeeper or perhaps Clothilde had drawn the drapes across the broad window there, so if there were armies massing in the night, anything at all happening in the back garden below, he couldn’t see it. He stifled his urge to inch the drapes apart.

  The door to the nursery was open a little. A lamp trimmed low was burning upon the mantel. Drosselmeier put his hand on the doorknob and leaned in.

  “I knew you’d come,” said Klara. “It’s not fair that I should be sick on Christmas Eve.”

  “It’s nor fair you should be sick at all. May I come in?”

  “Mama will scold.” She beckoned. Her hair was fanned out across her pillow.

  “I brought you a marzipan pig from the side table. You could adopt him or eat him, I don’t mind which.”

  “He probably minds.” She took a big bite so there was nothing left but his face. “But too bad.” The snout and eyes in her palm looked up complacently at her. She gobbled them down. “You never told me why you have an eye-patch.”

  “You never asked me.” He sat silently on the stool by her bedside.

  She pouted. “Are you going to make me ask?”

  “Not at all.”

  Still he sat silently.

  “All right,” she said, cross with him, “why do you wear an eye-patch?”

  “I lost my eye when I was a little boy.”

  “Oh.” She licked marzipan pig crumbs off her forefinger and sighed. For a while she just lay there in the half-dark, closing one eye and then the other in turn, practicing what it might feel like. “I think,” she concluded, “maybe a shark found it and ate it.”

  “It was in the woods.”

  “A very rare shark, then, a forest shark. Or a wolf.”

  “That’s more like it. Are you feeling up for a story?”

  “You’re trying to distract me from the mice, aren’t you.” She pointed at Fräulein Pirlipat, whose h
ead was now almost entirely severed from her body. She maintained a certain composure throughout her ordeals, managing to seem both acquainted with grief and philosophic about it. “That’s what they’ll do to me next.”

  “I’m going to leave the Nutcracker downstairs to defend you, my dear. That’s why I brought him. You’re in the finest hands. He’s a very capable soldier.”

  “He is an old man with a white beard.”

  “He is a young man inside, and strong.”

  “Fritz broke his jaw.” She began to cry a little. “The Nutcracker might have helped, but nothing can help.”

  “Nonsense. He merely needs to be bolstered. He needs a token to remind him what he is fighting for. That’s why I came up. A soldier or a knight always likes to have a memento of his beloved when he goes into battle. I wanted to borrow a ribbon of yours. I will bind up his jaw with it, as we do when we have a bad tooth. Tomorrow morning I will come back with a pot of glue and make him all better. And you will be better, too. I insist.”

  Klara didn’t say anything for a long time. Drosselmeier thought she might have fallen back to sleep. But then she said, “A pink tape came off one of my dancing slippers. If you think that would do, you will find it on the chest of drawers with a bobbin of thread. No one has had the time to fix it yet.”

  “This will do nicely,” he said. It was cool and smooth, and in the half-light of the lowered gas lamp the pink ribbon took on the color of a French-German child’s inner forearm. He coiled it in his palm. “Klara.”

  She didn’t speak, but opened her eyes.

  “I hope Fritz doesn’t ever touch you.”

  “Of course he touches me. We fight all the time.”

  “But never more than that. Don’t ever let him. Will you promise me that?”

  “What are you asking her to promise?” asked Clothilde, appearing at the doorway. “I thought you’d be here. This won’t do at all. You must leave at once.”

  93.

  His workshop looked cold and abandoned. He passed through it without turning a Teutonic knight on his horse to face a different damsel, without rearranging a wood-and-plaster set of the Brementown musicians. It was as if all figures of play were frozen if there wasn’t to be a child like Klara to inspire them to life.

  The building was chillier than usual because he’d been out most of the afternoon and evening and let the fire die down. He dressed for sleeping and he piled extra blankets and an old coat on top of the bed. Sometimes at night he read by the light of a candle—he had the new tales of Andersen in translation, and something called A Christmas Carol by that Englishman everyone went on about. But he had set the book aside at the Ghost of Christmas Past. It wasn’t the ghost that was improbable, but the possibility of a happy past.

  He blew out the candle.

  Klara has my childhood, he thought. She is my childhood brought forward, the one that died in me.

  And he enjoyed at last a small spasm of something he’d rarely noticed in himself: understanding.

  So that’s why I’ve spent my life making toys.

  He tossed and turned to keep warm. He thought of the girl’s clever imagination, its readiness to receive a serving of story. It isn’t only Klara, of course, but that fine-grained soil of childhood itself that can receive a seed of mystery and recognize when it starts to flower.

  Midnight bells announcing the sacred day. Somewhere, a skirmish of mice and toys raged back and forth across a parlor floor.

  If he did sleep, he didn’t mark the passage by dreaming. Dream may be many other things besides, but at its heart it is the primary proof of sleep. In dreams, as he had heard people say over and over, the world is rearranged. Battles are fought, and refought; the terms of life are overturned, reinterpreted; the columns of figures add up to new answers.

  Klara could walk along the coast at Meritor hand in hand with her godfather and with Fritz and chatter for twenty minutes about where she had been in her dreams the night before, until Fritz got bored and began to pitch stones at the seagulls, and Klara’s recitation eventually trailed off. The dreams never seemed to crest to a finale, like an opera. They failed, perhaps for lack of energy or, perhaps, due to Klara’s inability to remember.

  Admittedly, Drosselmeier had rarely had a dream in his life worth remembering upon waking. All his visions, were they visions, had visited him on some flooring other than ordinary sleep. Yet across that floor rolled a walnut, containing a secret vision sacred to some child or other.

  94.

  As invited, Godfather Drosselmeier arrived at the Stahlbaum residence shortly before luncheon on Christmas Day.

  “Ach, things went from bad to worse in the middle of the night, but they’ve stabilized this morning,” said Sebastian, pouring a cup of whipped eggnog for the old man. “Fritz is glazed with greed and pleasure, and Klara’s fever seems to have broken overnight, despite her misadventures.”

  “Oh?” Drosselmeier tried not to bolt from the parlor and head up the stairs. Though in any case he wasn’t much for bolting these ways. The word would have to be creak or toddle.

  He turned, studying Sebastian to distract himself from the curiosity about Klara’s evening. He noted the way Sebastian’s chin and lower lip seemed newly segmented—in fact, just the way the jaw of a wooden Nutcracker slips into the casing of its cheeks. Those lines running from the corners of his nostrils along the sides of his mouth. Worry was aging Sebastian. And if he is aging, though Drosselmeier, remembering the first time he himself had been brought to this house by Felix, and met that galloping boy in these rooms, the same is true for me. Elderly, but not wise. An old fool.

  A shaming tear stole from his eye, though whether this was about the lost boy Sebastian once had been, or the lost boy Drosselmeier had never himself managed to be, the old man didn’t know. But he thought of Nastaran suddenly, and her hunger for the locked and forbidden garden of her childhood.

  “Klara is on the mend, perhaps, though it’s probably too soon to be certain,” said Sebastian. “Each crisis seems like the final one, but thank God . . . But have you caught a germ from her, my dear Godfather Drosselmeier? You’re looking peaky. Let me add a tot of rum to your eggnog.”

  “Don’t bother, you’ll have me singing sad arias, and that would be a dreadful error, as I can’t carry a tune.” Drosselmeier set his cup in the saucer definitively. “And what happened over there?” He had noticed the glass-fronted curio cabinet.

  “Ah, evidence of the mishaps of the young,” said Sebastian. “Fritz slept through it, but both Clothilde and I were awakened at the crash. It happened in the middle of the night.”

  “A burglar?”

  “It was an inside job.” Sebastian’s eyes twinkled tiredly. “You may interview the miscreant in her cell if you choose.”

  Liberty granted, Drosselmeier mounted the stairs. The drapes were flung open, and the garden was domestic. Its evening mysteries, had there been any, were erased by the smudges of snow that blandished all.

  Heading around the corner to the first-floor landing, he thought, I didn’t even notice what the faun and the dryad looked like today. Perhaps they weren’t even there—they’d stepped off their pedestals in some sort of miracle of the Nativity. Gone out to take a meal together in the Odeonsplatz. Or left to examine Eros and the Painter, the latest work of Nikolaus Gysis, or some other artist prominent in the the Munich School. Or a concert of sacred cantatas by Bach. What a pair of guardian angels to be dogging me my whole life, he thought. The only way to be free of them is to die, so there is nothing left for them to guard.

  Or to die again, perhaps.

  The door to Klara’s room was wide open this morning. Clothilde was sitting in an upholstered rocking chair diligently stitching that pink tape from Klara’s dancing shoe—the one Drosselmeier had used as a poultice for the Nutcracker—around the neck of Fräulein Pirlipat. “I think more than one inhabitant of the nursery deserves therapeutic tending,” Clothilde said to Drosselmeier. She made as if to rise, but
he stilled her and leaned down to graze her cheek with his whiskers. “Klara’s doll seemed to have slipped dangerously near some guillotine, but I’m resolved to tend to her wounds.” How flush and relaxed, Clothilde, to enter into the spirit of it like that.

  He looked at Klara, who was just waking again. Her arm was done up in a sling of some sort. “What in heaven’s name?” he cried.

  “Godfather Drosselmeier,” she replied, and smiled a great lopsided grin. “Did you hear we won?”

  “I see you are better,” he observed. “So something was won. Whatever happened?”

  “I woke up in the middle of the night. Ach, I was worried about the poor Nutcracker! He was left all alone in the downstairs parlor. I thought his jaw must be hurting, having cracked itself on that golden walnut. So I dragged my coverlet down the stairs and lay on the settee and looked at the tree. Even thought the candles had all been whuffed out, the snow-light through the windows made the tree seem to sparkle. Then about midnight? When the clocks all struck? The King of the Mice came out to bite my head off, like Pirlipat’s. Despite his broken jaw, the Nutcracker roused Fritz’s armies into battle. All the toys from around the world joined in. Back and forth across the carpet they fought, and I thought the Nutcracker and his regiment was winning until guess who came to join the enemy’s side!”

  “Who?”

  Klara pointed at the doll. “This traitor! Bad doll! She must have been poisoned by that bite. It was very unrespectable of her. I think she’s sorry this morning, but last night she was an Amazon, and her help turned the tide against the Nutcracker. They began to take him prisoner and drag him into the underground. Then they would come back for me. I was so frightened that I knelt up on the sofa and I took my dancing slipper—the one without the tape, you know—and I threw it at the King of the Mice. I accidentally broke the glass in the curio cabinet, and the panes of broken glass fell everywhere. A piece of glass fell like a sharp knife and cut off the tail of the King of the Mice. And you know what that means.”