Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “You can’t be King without a tail. Not if you are a mouse. So all the mice fled in disarray and confusion. And then, since the glass was gone, I climbed up and reached in and got the key. And we opened the music and we opened the fairy castle and we all went to that land.”

  Drosselmeier glanced furtively at Clothilde. She was not protesting. Under her capable hands, Pirlipat was almost fixed. The rebellious doll looked abashed as well as reconstructed.

  “The land you have always told me about,” Klara said. “You know. The place where magic things happen.”

  “I think it was the jagged glass in the door of the cabinet that scraped your arm,” observed Klara’s mother.

  “No, it was the sword of the King of the Mice. I was there, too. In the battle. Please, did you bring the pot of glue?”

  “Of course. Would you like to eat it with a spoon?”

  “Godfather Drosselmeier!” She almost snorted.

  “I’ll fix the Nutcracker. You have to fix yourself,” he said.

  “I’m very much almost all better already,” she replied. “Aren’t I, Maman?”

  “You have a way to go. And I am going to sleep in here with you tonight to make sure you don’t go wandering about again.” She put down her needle and reached out to feel Klara’s forehead. Her own face was softened in a way Drosselmeier hadn’t seen in years. “You’re not out of the woods yet.”

  95.

  When Klara had nodded off again, cradling the Nutcracker in the crook of her sling, Clothilde motioned to Drosselmeier. They stood outside the door and spoke in hushed voices.

  “We had to send for the doctor in the middle of the night, did you hear?” she said. “Her fever was raving. She’d been throwing toys around the parlor as far as we could tell. She was right about the key though; she did extract it from the curio cabinet and open the fairy castle to its fullest extent. We must have been sleeping deeply, as we didn’t hear the crash—instead it was the melody from the music box that slowly and gently woke us. When we stole downstairs we found her in the dark, sweating through a dream that made her moan.”

  “She’s made a great recovery. I’m so relieved.”

  “The doctor said she is still in danger. She must rest quietly. That is hard for her. If you can help in the next few days . . .”

  “How can I help?”

  “You will make me beg you?” But she knew she didn’t have to beg. “Your fancifulness occupies her in a way her father and I can’t possibly match. She must be kept to bed for a few days, perhaps a week. Last night may have been the turning point of the current crisis, but she mustn’t be allowed to slip backward. Recovery is a long process. We’d be broken if we lost her, Dirk. Quite, quite broken.”

  “Of course, you know I should be honored to be of assistance.”

  “And forgive me if I was ill-tempered last night,” she finished.

  “You were worried. We all were worried.”

  “We must remain worried.”

  Later that day, when Drosselmeier was allowed to have a plate of his Christmas supper upstairs while Klara had hers in bed, he said to her, “I know your parents want you to get better for their own selfish reasons. I mean, they love you and all that.”

  “Why do you sound sad when you say that?”

  He didn’t answer. “More to the point, my dear goddaughter, is that you have to get better because I need you.”

  “Can we get married when I grow up?”

  “What a lovely idea. But I’m afraid I shall be too old by then. So you’ll have to find your own prince somewhere else. Or someone. Maybe not a prince. It’s hard to tell this early. No, I need you for something other than a wife.”

  She pouted, but said, “What can I do for you? You’re so old.”

  “That is exactly it. I have a problem I have never been able to solve.”

  “I’m not good at sums.”

  “It is not addition or subtraction. My problem has to do with the Little Lost Forest.”

  “What is that?”

  “Haven’t I told you before?” He told her again. He didn’t mention the faun and the dryad, the Pan and the Pythia, whoever they were; let those creatures stay in stone, frozen in a northern garden. They had frightened him as a boy, and he wouldn’t pass that on to Klara. He simply said, “I know of a sacred forest that needs to have a home. It needs someplace to grow. But I don’t know where it should be.”

  “Is this real,” she asked, “or is this a story?”

  “Well,” he said, “that I don’t know, either. But I’m afraid I’m getting too old to find out. If I haven’t located a home for the sacred forest yet, I shall have to leave the job to someone else. Will you take on that chore?”

  “Where is the sacred forest?”

  “I’m not certain,” he said. “I suppose it may be all around, disguised as the garden. Or perhaps it is hiding in the depths of the Black Forest. I think it’s been wandering for a very long time looking for a place it can root, and grow, and make itself at home. If you could go to the fairy-tale land last night, perhaps you can find a way to send the forest there, too. It might be willing to grow and thrive in a place like that.”

  “Godfather,” she said, “but you made the fairy-tale land.”

  “I only built it,” he said. “You visited. I gave you the key. You opened the lock.”

  96.

  Clothilde said, “I always sensed that he liked Klara better than he liked us.”

  Sebastian took her elbow. “He had a way with children. An appeal that worked upon me, too, until I grew up. I felt it was my fault, a little.”

  “Growing up?”

  “Well—not quite. But—losing track of something he wanted to give to me. Losing the way to hear him.”

  “Nonsense. That’s sentimental. You were always kind to him, don’t forget.”

  “It’s odd, isn’t it, that there isn’t more—more fuss over his death.”

  “Who mourns a toy maker? Toys get broken, and so do their makers.”

  Sebastian was silent. They sat alone in the chapel. “I’m not quite sure a Protestant burial is the right thing,” he said finally. “But I never heard him profess any sort of faith, really.”

  “He was raised by a minister somewhere south of here, wasn’t he? That’s evidence enough. Besides, he was godfather to our children.”

  “Yes. But what god or gods did he represent to them?”

  Clothilde had no answer for that. “Klara will be distraught to hear about this when she is back from her honeymoon.”

  “I’m glad there’s no way to reach her for another week. Let us see the old man to his grave. It is something we can do for our young bride.”

  As the minister entered for the service, the side door opened and Fritz slipped in, too. He knelt upon the stone floor for a moment and his shoulders shook with a wretched sort of abandon. Then he took a seat next to his mother. The stone walls of the chapel closed them all in, a prelude to mausoleum finality, though the eternal sky through colorless panes appeared to make an argument otherwise. Exalting, if ultimately unpersuasive.

  Coda

  Hiddensee

  All her life Klara was gifted with dreams and pestered by them, too.

  She enjoyed a full-throated if perhaps innocuous life. She outlived her own children and lost several of her grandsons in the Great War, by which point her daytime memory failed her completely. She used to sit and look out at the few remaining linden trees next to the third-hand Daimler that belonged to the upstairs tenants. She was too deaf to hear the occasional ruckus of brownshirts in the streets.

  When she was failing and needed removal to an asylum for the elderly, her surviving grandchildren cleared out the several ground-floor rooms in the old family house in Munich to which she had been reduced.

  There were too many copies of her stories, printed in German journals and also translated into English. Those of Klara’s tales that had been coll
ected and published in fine gift editions at the turn of the century were set aside for younger generations of the family. They were children’s stuff. Sweet gingery old pfeffernusse that she was, Klara had had a life, after all, and someday someone might want to read through the nicer volumes of what remained of Großmutter Klara’s work and see if there was anything worth remembering. The rest was tinder.

  If you were standing on the landing of the stairs, you could see the grandchildren—Felix’s great-great-grandchildren!—bringing the literature to the flame. The stacks of old St. Nicholas magazines made a glorious bloom in the bonfire. That bookburning was also going on that season in the Konigsplatz was a coincidence upon which no one remarked.

  The night before she died, her last night on earth, Klara had a particularly vivid dream. It was like a dream she’d had before, though maybe in different form. It seemed familiar. It began in the yellow parlor of her childhood. Mice, and a grotesque huge ugly doll-child, and small carved figurines, Citizens from Around the World, some set or other. The dream included toy soldiers, and a rampage of wild mice that were more like wolves, really. And a nutcracker. The battle was joined and won, and Klara went on to visit a serenely peculiar and fitting land in which food and drink, music and dance, love and laughter were cunningly made all of a single piece, somehow.

  This part of the dream Klara had had before, but the next part was new.

  She understood this much, that she would have no words to tell anyone about it when she woke up. She’d been beyond words for some time now. She didn’t know that, in fact, she would never entirely wake up after this.

  Still, the dream.

  She was a child at her grandfather’s house up at the sea. Meritor. In actuality she hadn’t been there in over half a century, and who knew if it even still stood or if it had fallen down the battered bluffs. In her dream she wasn’t tall enough to reach the handle to the front door. She couldn’t get out. The house was growing spooky, dark as a tomb, and she needed to go out into the open, but she couldn’t get out.

  Then she realized she had the Nutcracker crooked in her arm. She held him up as high as she could, and he reached up and worked the latch and turned the knob. The door swung open, and they both stepped over the sill.

  A stiff wind was howling around the corner of the house. The sky was bright and cloudless but not quite blue—rather more like mother-of-pearl. She could stand and look one way and then the other, to see if anyone was coming along the strand. No one was.

  She saw the spit of Rügen descending from the north, on the right-hand side of the horizon. After a stretch of open water, she saw the island of Hiddensee on her left. She had always meant to go there, but it had never yet happened.

  She walked to the edge of the water. The Nutcracker looked up at her with a quizzical expression. She took out a key and inserted it into a buttonhole on his fancy red coat, and his breastplate opened in two halves like a severed walnut falling apart at the seam. It was empty as a drawer at the end of summer when she was all packed to return from Meritor and go to school.

  She took Godfather Drosselmeier out of her apron pocket and said, I guess this is where you go. He was very small, like the toys she used to have when she was little. Only three or four inches. She could tell it was her godfather because of his eye-patch. But the visible eye was closed.

  She laid him into the breast of the Nutcracker and closed the two halves of the red coat. She didn’t lock the coat closed in case he ever wanted to come out.

  The waves pressed into the shore in long rocking motions—gentle swipes against the world.

  She set the Nutcracker on his back to float in the foam by her feet. One of her feet was clad in a pink dancing slipper and the other was bare. With her bare foot she nudged the Nutcracker away from the shore, as if he were a little boat like the kind Fritz used to play with in tidal pools.

  Fritz would be coming soon. She missed him and wanted to see him but she didn’t want him to wreck everything as usual, so she pushed the Nutcracker a little harder. She wanted it to float beyond easy reach.

  She thought she heard Fritz shout for her. She did hear him. She turned to see. He must be beyond the bluff, he was calling her, he would be here soon, around that barrage of stranded rocks, but she couldn’t see him yet. She turned back to watch the Nutcracker float away.

  He had moved out onto the busy foam as if on another military campaign—this one naval. Who knew he would be so clever at sea?

  Of course he would be that clever.

  She expected to lose sight of him as more and more ranks of waves drew their white parallel lines from left to right between the Nutcracker out to sea and Klara left on shore. But his red coat remained visible, a dot on the blue-black steel of the waves and the glass-green of the waves and the white lips of the waves.

  Then he was beyond the pounding of the tide and going farther out, and still through the spray she could see him on his back, that old Nutcracker. His head was facing one way and his feet the other, so he was long and low like the spit of Rügen, like Hiddensee.

  She realized with a glad clasp of her heart in her chest that he wasn’t drowning, he wasn’t sinking. He wasn’t even diminishing. He broke the laws of perspective, holding his own shape and size the farther out to sea he went.

  He was on the horizon now. A broad swath of red on the horizon like a sunset, only he was as large as Hiddensee. He was a bridge between Rügen Island and Hiddensee. He was an island, he was a land unto himself, he was a whole place. He was that other place, the Nutcracker: It was he, himself, a sovereign kingdom built of himself.

  She rubbed her eyes against the grit of the wind and the smudge of atmosphere, for finally the mists that always collect around horizons at sea were blurring the edges of the Nutcracker. She peered again. He had separated from Rügen and begun to drift behind Hiddensee. She might never see him again. She rubbed and rubbed, and it seemed to her that the red of his coat and the black of his hat and the white furze of his beard had gone green and black and bristled like a forested nation, a refuge out on its own on the high water.

  Over the sound of the waves and despite that distance, some sounds rose that made Klara’s heart feel bright and yearning, itself rising in accord. She heard some music, pipes perhaps, a stringed instrument, a tambour, and the sound of children at play—not the high shrieking of school-yard mayhem, but the quieter murmur of children in small groups, working, reading, thinking, laughing. With the kind of sobriety, so often forgotten, that children possess. The trees hid the children from view—maybe toys were playing there, maybe even mice. In any case, above that ground-level murmur of children in the sacred grove, she could make out the threaded notes of a thrush’s song. Perhaps all the sweeter for being so long delayed.

  DAS ENDE

  Acknowledgments

  Marc Platt at Universal Studios, for asking the question about the Nutcracker.

  Betty Levin, for inspiration and friendship these forty years and counting.

  Barbara Harrison and the team of The Examined Life: Greek Studies in the Schools, and also that of its sister organization, Children’s Literature New England, for welcoming me back to Greece—especially Olympia, where this novel was seeded.

  Bob Piller and Beatrice von Mach, for dearly valued friendship and for travel assistance and companionship from Zürich to Meersburg and beyond.

  Jill Paton Walsh, whose Hellenophilia has been constant and contagious.

  Vivien Rameau, of München, for advice on Bavaria and on the German language (any mistakes are mine, for failing to ask the right questions).

  Christine Johner, M.A., Abteilungsleitung, Kultur & Museum, Stadt Meersburg am Bodensee, for answering questions about Meersburg in the nineteenth century and especially about Mesmer.

  Moses Cardona, of John Hawkins and Associates, literary agents.

  Cassie Jones, Liate Stehlik, and the rest of the great team at William Morrow and HarperCollins US.

  Scott McKowen, for the arres
ting cover artwork on the U.S. edition.

  Ann Fitch, Rafique Keshavjee, and Andy Newman, for comments upon the manuscript, read in parts or entire.

  Nikos Trivoulidis and Christos Lygas, at whose Athens home—a home in the Plaka once owned by Irene Papas!—sections of Hiddensee were first read aloud. On a rooftop terrace, just below the Acropolis and the temple called the Erechtheion, as the April evening fell. Elysium.

  Mara Kanari, ambassador-goddess of Greece to the scholars and fellows of the Examined Life: Greek Studies in the Schools, for embodying the ideals of Greece, which yet survive, stamped on living generations.

  Eva Varellas Kanellis and Panos Kanellis of the American Farm School in Thessaloniki (site of the GM Writing Center), for steady friendship.

  The stalwarts of IBBY/Greece, who nominated GM for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Prize: Vagelis Iliopolous, Eva Kaliskami, and Vassiliki Nika; and the staff of the I. M. Panagiotopoulos School in Pallini, Athens, for their continuing welcome.

  Zacharias and Ana Tarpagos, flautists of Rafina, Athens, for heightening readings of Hiddensee with melodies of Greece and of Tchaikovsky.

  The Gregory family of Albany, New York, and the far-flung Yiannapolous family, especially cousins from Kato Toumba, Thessaloniki, for keeping lit the flame of family feeling.

  The Prabhaker family of Northampton, especially L.L.P., for serving me at the Boys and Adders Café. We all get to come home sometimes.

  About the Author

  GREGORY MAGUIRE is the New York Times bestselling author of After Alice; Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister; Lost; Mirror Mirror, and the Wicked Years, a series that includes Wicked—the beloved classic that is the basis for a blockbuster Tony Award–winning Broadway musical—Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz. Maguire has lectured on art, literature, and culture both at home and abroad. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.