Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

  8.

  At this point it would be false to say the world sang to Dirk in his new freedom. It may have been singing, but not to him; or he was deaf, unschooled in such melodies. He tramped along, aware of his bruises and aches, unaware of shafts of Rheingold light, birdsong, malodorous water cabbage, rococo flourishes of ivy along the boughs of ancient oaks.

  A bit of a dolt, that is to say.

  The farther he got from the waldhütte, the more indistinct it grew in his mind. As if he’d never lived there. Peculiar, especially since he had never lived anywhere else.

  The light was rational and the shadow romantic, and he could sense a purring tension, but he had no words, no references by which to articulate it. And no one to tell it to.

  The one thing he did notice was the water. It seemed every time he crested a slope and walked or slid down the other side, he found a stream at the bottom.

  You can’t be so surprised; where else is mountain water to go? It doesn’t just stand upright on the tops of ridges, picking its nose, said the figure on the knife in his hand.

  Of course, knives don’t talk. Dirk suspected he was imagining things out of worry. Nonetheless, to be polite, he asked the knife which way he should go.

  If what you want is to live among your kind, then follow the next substantial stream, said the knife. It will end in a lake or a river. People tend to gather on those shores. They will provide interest and possibly supper. But if what you want is to be unencumbered by human sorrow, keep to the forest. True, the forest is full of appetites on four legs. You might easily satisfy one of them before you know it. Your bearskin cloak will conceal you only so long. But you will be free until the forest catches up with you. And I’ll be free when you let me go. I’ve waited this long, I suppose I can hold my temper until then.

  The hours passed. The light shifted. Everything nearby looked the same, but the depths of the forest were growing blacker. When Dirk approached a newly fallen tree that spanned a river, a little brown bird emerged from the greyed, papery leaves that still clung to its branches. You’ll have to cross eventually, said the bird.

  Birds don’t talk, he said, trying his foot on the muddy roots to see how stable the tree might be.

  Of course we don’t, not to humans, said the bird, cheerily enough. You’re probably just lonely. Still, watch your step. Keep to the trunk and take your time.

  Oh, she added, when Dirk was about halfway across, you might drop that knife in the river if you wanted. It will do you no good, and water is efficient at rusting mettlesome items.

  Beware advice you haven’t asked for, snarled the knife-head.

  Both of you, be quiet, said Dirk. I must concentrate or I’ll end up washing my clothes with me in them. I’m still learning the one-eye skill.

  Coming off the tree involved a run through tangled branches. His feet got wet in the far shallows. The bearskin dropped in the water, and there it stayed. Sodden, it was too heavy to lug along.

  The knife and the bird fell silent. Beyond the bank, a clearing. Dirk scaled the slope to see what he might see. A wooden fence and a small stone house. A woman hunched on a bench in the westering sun. She was winding a ball of yarn. She didn’t look at the sun or at the yarn. Her eyes seemed to be settled upon something invisible in the yard, halfway between her lap and the gate.

  She was an old woman, but not the old woman that Dirk had left behind. Perhaps older. Dirk had no practice at making distinctions.

  The brown bird, who had fluttered about Dirk as he lumbered along, hid herself in the hood of an oak tree. She sang sweetly as the light and the shadows both lengthened. She commented on her own song as she sang it.

  From far enough away, the piccolo is like a bird.

  Far enough away, the bird a piccolo.

  From long enough ago, the sharpest joy you ever heard

  Cuts like a knife, if long enough ago.

  So childhood gets stronger as we age

  And haunts and taunts the venerable sage,

  Till childhood itself from wherever it had seemed to go

  Returns, and takes up note by note and word by word

  The word we heard when bird was piccolo.

  The leathery old woman shuddered, though the air seemed warm to Dirk, and the breeze refreshing. She cried out. A man came through the door and settled a bonnet upon her head, tying the strings under her chin. He wasn’t old the way she was. Though older than Dirk.

  “What’s ailing you, Mutter?”

  She flapped a hand in dismissal, and didn’t look at him. He went away and came back with a shawl. She pulled it over her shoulders with a kind of angry greed.

  “Sunset can make the sweetest fig taste a little tart.” The man sat on the doorsill and pulled a long pipe out of a vest pocket. Crouching in the shadows, Dirk examined this enterprise of family. “Having one of your days, then?”

  “Achh.” She spit on the ground. “God’s blood in a thimble.”

  From the cottage came the smells of plenty—warm bread and sizzling meat, perhaps a joint of venison. Carrots in honey. Dirk’s mouth went so wet he wanted to spit, too, but wiped it out on his wrist, so to keep silent and watch how other people talked. He heard chairs scraping on wooden floorboards, so he knew someone was inside, working on supper.

  Then, inside, a woman sang something nonsensical, and a child went laughing at it. The words were indistinct, but the exotic performance crowded out the bird’s song from Dirk’s mind. Such lightheartedness sounded dangerous if not insane.

  The man struck a safety match upon the stone and lit his pipe. “Do you know who I am today?”

  “Saint Jerome the scholar,” replied the elderly woman after a time. An effort at being canny.

  “Hardly that! You always said I had noodle pudding in my skull.”

  She crossed herself, apologizing for her mistake perhaps.

  “Try again,” he said. “Bring yourself home, Mutter. Who am I?”

  She turned the ball of yarn in her lap but didn’t look down at it. Perhaps her sight was gone. “You are the king who has a virgin daughter to marry off.”

  “That’s a good one. You’ve walked sideways into one of your own stories that you used to tell me when I was a lad! But really, I’m the great king of nothing, Mutter, and I don’t have a virgin daughter but a virgin son, whose sausage hasn’t yet filled its casing. Come now. Do you really not know who I am?”

  “A pest, with all your nonsense!” In a rage, she swatted at him and nearly fell off the bench. He paid her no mind.

  “Who are you then? Do you remember that?”

  “You tell me, if you know so much,” she snapped.

  “You’re old Dame Mitzelhaupf. Agathe Mitzelhaupf. You have lived your whole life in this parish. Your husband was Gustav—do you remember Gustav? He was good to you and built you this house. Here you raised me and my sisters, till they all went off to get married.”

  “Good riddance to them,” she said; and, “But I never had daughters. Too expensive.”

  “And now you live here with your son, Hans. That’s me. And my wife, that’s Berthe. And our boy, your beloved little Torsten.”

  “Ah, Torsten.” She sat up, as if this was the only part of her life she could identify. “Where is he?”

  “Helping his mother lay the table. But it is time for him to bring the cow from the pasture. Torsten!” called Hans. “Come at once!”

  A young boy appeared, smaller than Dirk. “Here is Torsten,” said Hans. It was the first child Dirk had ever seen. “Torsten, your grandmother has been vague in her mind again. Give her a kiss.”

  “Come, child.” Imperiously she pointed to her withered cheek. Little Torsten planted a kiss there and backed off.

  “Now to your chore. The cow is just beyond, in the pasture, wanting to come home. Go open the gate.” Hans pointed. Dirk turned his head. A cow was indeed regarding the domestic scene, chewing through the drama of it.

  As Torsten scampered down the track that led to the
pasture, Dirk retreated into the woods and followed him. Torsten in light and Dirk in dark.

  Hans had been curiously jocular. The grandmother had seemed regal and difficult. But Torsten was only a boy in lederhosen, with plump pink knees and soft flyaway hair. Dirk found him easy to follow.

  As Torsten fussed with the rope that tied the gate, Dirk squatted down among the ferns. When he found a smooth stone the size of a robin’s egg, he threw it at the boy to get his attention.

  At the impact, the boy whipped around. It seemed to Dirk that Torsten was staring straight at him. “Who’s there?” he cried.

  Another stone to speak with. Dirk threw it.

  The boy fled, leaving the gate wide open. The cow followed through without complaint.

  Again Dirk paced beside the boy’s path, keeping deep enough in the cover of woods that he couldn’t be seen. By the time Torsten was in his father’s arms, the little lad was weeping. Blood made a prettiness on his cheek.

  “Did you fall?” asked the father.

  “What’s wrong with the child?” asked the grandmother.

  “Something in the woods!” cried Torsten. “I was struck five times with stones! I turned and looked.”

  “What was there?” asked the grandmother. “What did you see?”

  “I saw a gnome, a little schwarzkopf, staring at me with an evil grin!”

  “Nonsense,” said his father. “There is no such goblin in these woods, Torsten.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” said the grandmother. “Torsten knows what he knows.”

  “It was a hateful creature, small enough, but fierce and ugly, and it had a hunch on its back and a sack to carry me away in!”

  “Stay away from black-caps, stay out of the woods,” said Agathe Mitzelhaupf.

  “Don’t talk foolishness to him,” said Hans crossly.

  “I know what I know,” said Agathe. “I’ve heard that gnome calling to me from time to time, but my knees are too much like soft cheese to go clock him on the head as he deserves.”

  “Supper on the table,” called a woman from inside. Berthe, probably.

  “You heard no goblin black-cap, Mutter.” Hans lifted his mother to a standing position. “It’s wicked to mix up your old tales with the truth. All you could hear from the woods was a little evening birdsong. Torsten, wash your face and your hands. Mutter, mind the step or you’ll go off to the devil before he’s ready to receive you.”

  “Angels will carry me to Paradise, where I intend to make a lot of trouble.” But she was laughing a little now. Whatever crisis she had been suffering was over.

  Dirk stood and watched the door close. The aroma of supper drifted out the open window.

  The bird was silent. Indeed, she was nowhere to be seen. Dirk looked at the carved handle on the knife. Its crouching gnarled figure grinned with protuberant eyes at him. It looked as if it had a little woven cap upon its bulbous head, fitted as neatly as the cap of an acorn upon its kernel.

  9.

  At darktime, Dirk spread out some lengths of burlap on a heap of hay in a stall next to the cow. He lay down. It was too cold, but there was nothing else to use as a blanket. He shouldn’t have abandoned the drowned bearskin. In a cubby with a tin lining he found a sack of milled flour. It was sewn shut. With some effort he hauled it to the hay. He lay down beside it as if it were a person who could keep him warm, and he spread the burlap over both of them. He thought about that little boy, Torsten. He would have liked to have a friend, or a younger brother, if only in his dreams. However, he wasn’t in the practice of having dreams.

  A barn mouse, several in fact, climbed the hill of the sack while he slept. Hardly believing their good fortune, they gnawed through the threads. They had a better supper than he did.

  10.

  He woke before dawn. His shoes in one hand and the staff in the other, he slipped out the side door of the barn. He was intending to tiptoe on the grass, get going and get gone, when he was stopped by a sound from the house.

  The father, that Hans, stood in the open door of the kitchen. He was dressed in a long greasy shirt. His legs and feet were bare. He had his pipe in his hand. He had been about to knock it against the doorsill to clear it out. Enjoy a draft of cherry tobacco before the day’s work began.

  Dirk and Hans, they stared at one another without speaking.

  If Hans would just pick Dirk up the way he had done little Torsten, that would be fine indeed. Dirk was, after all, younger in mood and mind than perhaps he was in years, having been raised an isolate.

  The father shifted his foot and kept working at his pipe, but his eyes were trained on Dirk, who stood like a rabbit ready to dash.

  “Our Torsten said it was a little dark dwarf with a black cap,” murmured Hans, loud enough for Dirk to hear. “Are you he? Do you darken as the day gets longer? Or are you the dwarf’s counterpart, to bring some sort of a blessing? You’re welcome here, if you promise to do no harm.”

  They talk sometimes of l’heure bleue, that segment of evening when the sun has fallen below the horizon but the vegetable world is still visible. Also more intense, as a consoling purple rises beneath every grieving leaf. Pre-dawn has a counterpart. A sort of light is cast from the world itself, before the sun gets to its job. It is beige and yellow, or amber like an ale.

  Dirk stood in l’heure bronze, and waited. If his heart trembled, his eye remained unblinking.

  Hans stooped to put down the pipe on the doorstep. When he stood up again, to comfort the waifling, the boy was gone. Without a sound.

  As Dirk moved through the newborn world, clouds of fine meal puffed from his clothes, rendering him more solid, less an apparent ghost-child than he must have seemed in the barnyard.

  11.

  Dirk continued downstream. The world breathed and steamed. Wherever the little river slowed to widen and to shallow, sheers of wisp arose, dissolving into loose columns.

  If you want to keep my company, go back to the forest, advised the gnome-knife. See those stones ahead where the river narrows into a rapids? You can cross back to the wildness there. I can’t follow you into the human world.

  The boy is made for his own kind, not for ours, said the thrush. A rushing river means a mill. A mill means a settlement. He is of no use to us. Leave him to his destiny.

  And me to mine. You have no agency here, Fräulein. He may not be our salvation, but send him to the human wolves? A kugelhead like him? The world would carve him up. Whereas I’d rather do the honors.

  Dirk interrupted them. “Hush.”

  The brown thrush whisked about him in the air as if she could bully him forward. Dirk kept on, but not because of her. He knew a bit more about people now that he was able to add Torsten, Hans, and Großmutter Agathe to his collection. He wanted to learn more. He was too young to be a hermit.

  Misty forests leaned in upon the encircling slopes. Before long the cataracts descended around a corner and were tamed into a millpond.

  Storehouses and other timbered structures were arranged around a well. There, a young woman rotated a crank, lowering a bucket. His sixth new person, not counting the visitor to the waldhütte, whom he hadn’t actually seen.

  The thrush flew up to the roof of the well but made no comment.

  The boy wondered if this was the village that he’d always been prohibited from visiting. Though probably there was more than one village in the world.

  Against the chill, the doors were closed and windows shuttered. Roosters marked the hour, cows lowed to be milked, but the village was still sleeping. Only this woman in her apron, keen to her task.

  He stood a distance, waiting for her to look up. She had a full, satisfied belly and her russet hair was undone in the back. “Oh, you startled me,” she said when she turned to decant a pail of water into one of two pewter pitchers. “Where do you come from, tousle-head?”

  He shrugged.

  “A changeling child? Did you go to sleep as a piglet and wake up as a boy? They’re much the same, in my exp
erience. I’ve known pigs to take better care of their grooming than you do.” She kept working as she spoke. Her manner wasn’t unkind. She was young, he thought. Younger than the old man and the old woman. Though old enough to be grown.

  He thought about the visitor to the waldhütte, the man who’d been hunting stories. The old woman had said that the curious fellow and his brother were staying in the village. “Have you had guests overnight, two men?” he asked the maiden.

  She patted her spreading waistline. “Two men? You’re cruel and sinful to suggest such a thing. Wasn’t one enough, to get me into such a barrel as this?” She winked at him, a gesture he didn’t understand. He tried to wink back, uselessly.

  “Bat your ugly eye at me, will you? You’re too young, and I’ve already had a journeyman at my threshold, as you can see. But I must get inside before others are about. The pastor says it’s unseemly for a woman in my condition to be out and about, confusing the morals of the young. So I rise early to do my chores, and hide my shame from the daylight and the neighbors. Let me pass.”

  “I mean, guests in the village overnight,” he said. “Two men, two travelers?”

  “You’re the only traveler we’ve seen since Lent.” She heaved the ewers and balanced one upon each shoulder. Small tongues of water splashed in her wake.

  “Don’t follow me,” she said after a while. “The fools all say I’m a vessel of sin. They’ll think you’re the imp assigned to punish me. Or that I’m leading you astray.”

  She reached a house with a set of steps up the side. She climbed the steps. When she got to the top, she put the pitchers on the landing so she could work the latch. Dirk stood below.

  “I thought I told you to go. What, do you want a scrap of food? Am I my brother’s keeper?”

  He thought she meant she would give him something. He came forward a few feet till he stood at the bottom of the steps. She lifted one pitcher of water and dashed it over him. He shrieked and tried to back away, but he wasn’t fast enough. “That’s why I always take two, one for me and one to share.” She cried with laughter. “If you want charity, gnaw like a church mouse at the door of the minister. See if he gives you more understanding than he gives me.” Slam, went the door.