Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

  12.

  He stood shivering for a moment. His mind only a bowl of ice blood. But eventually he realized that if he was to go see the minister, perhaps he should clean up first. He washed at the fountain as well as he could.

  13.

  A woman with white hair hobbled by. She was picking over a basketful of moldy rolls, and offered him none. But she pointed out the chapel to Dirk. Locked or not, she didn’t know. The minister’s schedule was none of her concern.

  The small building stood opposite the village well. A façade of grey stuccoed plaster, tidy to a fault. A side door was propped open, so Dirk mounted the steps and peered inside.

  His eye adjusted to the gloom, but it was hardly worth the effort. The windows weren’t visions of the Life of Christ in colors, as the old man in the waldhütte had loved to describe. Instead, panes of watery glass, slightly greened and dotted with imperfections. Between white mullions the overcast Bavarian sky was divided into rectangles of equal size. In vain Dirk looked for statues of the Madonna and Child, something the old man had described with a ferocity of feeling that almost approached anger. No statues. No paintings of Saint Paul knocked on his breeches by lightning, or Saint George and the dragon, or Saint Ursula and her retinue of eleven thousand virgins.

  Golgotha; Dirk wanted to see what Golgotha looked like. And Bethlehem, and the castle of Pontius Pilate. And the tomb of Lazarus. And Christ walking on the waves.

  And the Garden of Eden. Snakes and apples. Ripeness of possibility. It was a bitter blow, all this severity.

  “If you’ve come for salvation, you’ve come to the right place,” said a man, emerging from a broom closet under a pulpit. He must be the minister. His forehead was big and his chin dissolved into his neck, and his hair had gotten knocked askance on the low doorsill, so he looked like the uprooted head of a scallion.

  Dirk said, “Where do you keep the stained glass? I heard there were apostles and martyrs to look at, and a cock crowing by Saint Peter’s weeping eyes.”

  The minister dusted his hands on the front of his Geneva gown. “Ach, seeking the propaganda of Rome? You won’t find it here, my boy. Those pictures are made by savage, deluded men. Here, the Heavenly Ghost delivers perfect peace in our hearts without such blasphemous imagery.”

  “Not in mine.” Dirk didn’t mean to argue but he was famished.

  “You’re just stupid and lazy, and besides, the young like to be fooled. How well I remember. I suppose you’re hungry as well as dirty? The rules of mercy apply to all, regardless of persuasion. Come along. I have a plate of sweet cakes left from last night’s dinner.”

  That sounded good, so Dirk followed the minister through a passage to a set of rooms in the back. The boy clenched the knife in his pocket just in case, but the minister was beyond reproach. He laid out a small blue plate and poured a glass of milk that was only a little sour. Then he brought forward butter in curls, and pastries with gooseberry jam, and two rounds of ruddy wurst and another of soft yellow cheese. “First we ask God to bless the food, then we eat it,” he told the boy.

  “I’m not a fool, I know about blessing.”

  While Dirk gobbled the breakfast, the minister talked about faith. He warned against the visions of the devil. He said Dirk must beware of icons and statues. Those temptations threatened the innocent, all those Catholic paintings of naked martyrs bound for piercing. The minister had a good deal to say, and it lasted the entire meal. When both rounds of sausage, three rolls, some pastries, the milk, and most of the cheese had disappeared into his stomach, Dirk said, “Are you practicing?”

  “Practicing what?”

  “A sermon? I never heard a sermon before.”

  “What congregation do you belong to, boy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then it’s a good thing I’m steering you away from occasions of sin such as Rome in her pagan way promotes. Babylon’s fleshpots.”

  “Where might I see these saints and statues and all that?”

  “But haven’t I just been warning you against idolatry?”

  “I should probably see them first, to know what to avoid.”

  The minister sighed. “You seem to have one spoiled eye already. Don’t abuse the second. Now about that crutch you carry like a lance over your shoulder. It isn’t the right size for you. Yet you burden yourself with it. Why? Is it a weapon?”

  It took Dirk a while to think up something to say. “I am probably bringing it to someone who needs it.”

  “Listen, child. The stories of saints, the landscapes of those Italians and of Rembrandt, you don’t need them. They are all a crutch. A distraction. Throw those illustrations away. Throw that pike away. You don’t require it and it doesn’t fit you anyway. And I won’t harm you.”

  “It’s left over from someone else’s life, but I might grow up tall enough to need it myself.”

  The man laughed at that. “My name is Pfarrer Johannes. You may stay here and eat my food every day until you are sure you need no such crutch. If you like. In the meantime, let me stitch you a patch for that bad eye. Can’t imagine how you came by that.”

  This is how Dirk turned into an assistant to Pfarrer Johannes, and how he came to live with him, and every morning to sweep the cold chapel clear of mouse droppings. The thrush never appeared on any windowsill. The knife-head had been struck so dumb by holiness that Dirk forgot it had ever spoken to him.

  Once Dirk asked Pfarrer Johannes about the young woman with the big belly, which detail by now Dirk understood to mean “with child.” Dirk had never seen the woman again. Pfarrer Johannes hawed and hemmed but finally said, “She went away.”

  “With the child?”

  “Twins. No. I mean she died.”

  “Oh. Did the twins die?”

  “No, I’m afraid not. They became foundlings, more or less.”

  Oh, thought Dirk. Then: “But what of their father? Couldn’t he take care of them?”

  “Poor mites, they had no father,” explained Pfarrer Johannes, wincing.

  “Like Jesus, then.”

  “Not exactly. Aren’t you picking up anything at all while you are here?”

  “Crumbs,” said Dirk. He was getting bigger.

  14.

  In the years that Dirk spent with Pfarrer Johannes Albrecht at the village church of Achberg, the old woman and old man with whom Dirk had once lived never came looking for him. Nor did they come to town for any other reason. Dirk asked the minister if he knew those two old people living deep in the forest, not so far off. When the minister asked for their names, Dirk found himself at a loss. The old man had addressed the old woman only as “You old Fräulein,” and spoken of her as “the old Fräulein.” She had called him only “Papi,” and so had Dirk. Though Papi wasn’t Dirk’s father, of course, except by accident.

  So on the subject of their Christian names, Dirk couldn’t answer Pfarrer Johannes. The question was dropped.

  Dirk swept the floors, washed the clear windows till they shone, took the minister’s laundry to the laundress and picked it up again. He wasn’t required to attend service, but he loitered in the vestibule, keeping a beaker of water on hand in case Pfarrer Johannes needed to clear his throat between first and second hours of the sermon. And the boy listened a little. Mostly his mind wandered. But it didn’t have anywhere special to wander to.

  Apparently it was customary for Pfarrer Johannes to take in abandoned children from time to time, for no one seemed surprised to see Dirk answer the door to receive a loaf of bread, a flagon of wine, hoops of sausages in a basket. Gifts for the minister. No one asked Dirk his name, neither did they propose he ought to attend school. They probably assumed he was being educated by the good father.

  Perhaps he was and didn’t know it. Once, he said to the minister, “Why do you keep me here?”

  The man took off his spectacles and began to polish them. “Do you recognize kindness? Do you know it?”

  “I know the word.”

  “Well,
no matter. None of us can see the blessed air, but that doesn’t stop us from breathing it.”

  “But why do you keep me here?”

  “To practice my sermons on, don’t you think?” There was a merry quizzicalness in Pfarrer Johannes’s face. Dirk gave up and went on with his chores.

  He kept to himself. Of other children—for there were children in the village, of course there were—he knew little except the sound of their voices at play, in the gloaming of long summer days. He liked the sound of their laughter, but only in the sense that it had a musical cadence. Other than that, their calling and shouting in games and play sounded, frankly, stupid.

  When his legs felt eager to run and join them at play, he didn’t want to. When he wanted to, his legs stayed still.

  15.

  Came the day, perhaps seven years into Dirk’s apprenticeship at the chapel, when a troupe of musicians entered the village near sunset. They had been on their way to sing a High Mass for the local margrave in his palace nearby, but a midday summer thunderstorm had washed out the road. Two horses had slipped into a ravine, breaking any number of legs between them. While replacements were sent for, the musicians required housing for the night.

  By now the ecclesiastical situation had become clear to Dirk. Pfarrer Johannes’s congregation, small and devout as it was, saw itself beset on all sides. The village provided sanctuary for this outpost of a Swiss-inflected Calvinism. But its faithful had grown thorny and inward-looking from being outnumbered by the vast Roman Catholic population of the kingdom of Bavaria.

  That evening, at the tavern, the visiting Catholic choir members and the local Protestant farmers came to some disagreements over scripture. The discussion concerned the Christian souls of animals. The pious butcher lost three teeth. The traveling kapellmeister was cursed to the fifth level of Hell. Worst of all, in the middle of the night a few of the visiting rogues managed to breach the locked doors of Pfarrer Johannes’s austere chapel.

  When Dirk arrived at the side door to open up the next morning, he discovered the disaster. A bear was wandering about in a state of distress. It had knocked over candlesticks and shat upon the tiles. Maybe under cover of night someone had lured the wild creature into the chapel. Or maybe, once the doors were broken open, some woodland bear feeling the need of repentance had come for salvation. No one could say. Somehow the battered door had closed behind the bear and latched itself. The bear had spent an uneasy dark night of the soul.

  After Dirk regained his footing, he circled to the front of the building. He flung open the double doors. The bear lumbered out on all fours, to begin a life of penitence and good works, perhaps, or to take the Protestant Gospel back to the forest.

  Its fur coat was still usefully upon its own back. That was something.

  Nursing headaches, the choir members left the village about midday, pursued by a congregation of equally muddle-headed locals. No one was bothering with mea culpa. It fell to Dirk to mop up the mess.

  “This is beyond toleration,” said Pfarrer Johannes, bringing one bucket of water after another. “Filthy animals.”

  “I don’t think the bear could help it.”

  “I wasn’t talking about the bear.”

  Dirk regarded the broken window. The shards of glass were on the floor, so the window must have been smashed from outside. Smears of blood showed that the bear had cut its paw prowling in a circuit around the pews, looking for an exit.

  Then: “We all show too little tolerance for those who are not like us.”

  “Do you think bears have souls?” asked Dirk. This was perhaps his first abstract question.

  “It is not what I think.” Pfarrer Johannes sounded prim and tired. “It is what God thinks.”

  Usually Pfarrer Johannes was comfortable being God’s spokesperson, but as he seemed taciturn today, Dirk dropped the subject. He concentrated on the task. The sky through the broken mullions, the torn hymnals, the quality of bearish odor even when a bear has been absent for several hours. It all added up to some other question, though whether it was about bears or not, Dirk wasn’t sure. Could a bear be christened? If a bear died and lost its skin, could it ever go back and reclaim it so that its cousins in heaven would still recognize it when it arrived?

  After an evening meal, Pfarrer Johannes went from house to house and interviewed some of his flock. Then he came home and locked himself in his study and didn’t come out till the morning. He intercepted Dirk in the path by the churchyard. Dirk was airing yesterday’s cleaning rags on the gravestones.

  “Dirk,” said Pfarrer Johannes. “I need ecclesiastical advice in this matter. You are to carry my complaint to the Roman Bishop’s residence in Meersburg. I will include a letter to introduce you. What is your last name?”

  All these years in, and this was the first time the minister had asked. Dirk could only say, “I am a foundling.”

  The minister turned over the packet of correspondence in his hands. “I can’t call you Dirk Foundling,” he said. His voice betrayed an unaccustomed tenderness. Perhaps he was ashamed of his lack of curiosity up till now.

  “You could baptize me with a new name,” suggested the boy.

  Pfarrer Johannes wasn’t one to joke about matters of faith and good works. He stood in the shadows of the arborvitae. Young children in the nearby school-yard screamed in pleasure, torturing some poor idiot smaller than they were. The clock in the village tower sounded the hour. A brown bird hopped on the edge of a stone urn, and chirped.

  “Dirk Drosselmeier,” said Pfarrer Johannes Albrecht. Whether this was a christening or not, Dirk didn’t know. He had no reason to argue, though. A fellow needed two names, one for affection and the other for civic duty. “Get your things, young Herr Drosselmeier.”

  “I’ll be coming back?” he asked.

  “God knows the answer to that question.”

  Dirk had an extra shirt in his nook. He packed it in a leathern satchel that Pfarrer Johannes gave to him. Into the pack Dirk also put a hunk of bread, some ham, a round of cheese. He remembered his gnome-hasped knife just in time, so he could cut through the cheese’s rind.

  “How will I find Meersburg?” he asked.

  “Come. I shall walk with you to the right road and point you on your way.” The minister sighed. “If you see that bear in the woods, tell it I harbor no ill will.” Dirk had nothing to say to this. He had learned that Pfarrer Johannes was kind, but he couldn’t tell when Pfarrer Johannes was making a joke. The minister went on: “I see, Drosselmeier, you still have your crutch.”

  “Yes.”

  “I remember what we said about that when you arrived. I told you to throw away your fanciful stories and your need for vivid paintings and images of the life of Christ and the way of faith. I asked you if that staff was yours, and you said you couldn’t yet tell me. Have you learned anything while you were here? Have you outgrown childish things, Drosselmeier? Now you are getting toward being a man? Can you throw your staff away?”

  “It fits me nicely now,” said Dirk. “It is not too big any longer.”

  “All in good time, then. Do you realize I will miss you?”

  “Not too much,” replied Dirk.

  The minister shook his head fondly and waited for Dirk to say something more, but the boy had nothing to add. So Pfarrer Johannes kissed the boy and sent him on his way.

  Bildungsroman

  16.

  The worthy minister had pointed out the only road that tended toward Meersburg. A bit of a hike; Dirk would be leaving the Kingdom of Bavaria for the Grand Duchy of Baden. It would take several days, depending on how lucky Dirk was in getting a lift. And in getting accurate directions.

  “Lucky?” Dirk had asked.

  Pfarrer Johannes had corrected himself. “Blessed.”

  Luck and grace: an unmatching pair of boots with which to address a long dusty road.

  The early summer day was fine. Dirk minded his gait. For a while the path ran between golden meadows and fields. Barns and f
armhouses squatted among them, stout with prosperity. The world was at work. An early harvest of hay on that slope, with hired workers stopping to break bread and share ale at noon. A family tending a fenced garden of peas and beans. Dirk asked for no portion. He was happy to anticipate his own bread and cheese.

  Before long the road left the arable terrain behind. An airy woods of aspen and larch closed around the boy. He was to follow the road toward Lindau and then ask for directions to Meersburg.

  Making his way around the brow of a ridge, Dirk saw the three arches of a stone bridge spanning a vigorous stream. The path before him diverged. The main route led over the bridge to the far bank. The second path kept to the side on which Dirk had been traveling. It dipped underneath the nearer arch, into darkness and out the other side. Deeper into the forest.

  He knew which way he was meant to go, but not which way he would go. He paused to think about it.

  A brown bird came down from some bower and landed upon the rustic rail of the bridge. She sat there, almost encouragingly, were he to think about it like a poet. Come, come this way, bright world ahead, she seemed to want to say, in short bursts of song.

  And yet what now is hidden in shadows below may become more welcome to you in the long run, growled a voice in his pocket. This is my third and final warning. You can leave the path entirely, don’t you know that? Pick up your bearskin.

  How I have grown, thought Dirk to himself; that I can now hold two contrary thoughts in my head.

  All paths lead to the same place, and that place is whatever comes next.

  At this rate, I shall soon be ready for university.

  He tried to whistle a response to the songbird in a complementary key, but he ducked his head and chose the lower path, grinning at the thought of bridge trolls or billy goats gruff huffing and stamping beneath, waiting to rake him in.