Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

Gingerly, trying not to settle his full weight upon her, he suspended himself like a plank above her. He used his hands to take some of the weight off her torso, but she arched her hips and battered his midriff with hers as if to get his attention. “Are you entirely made?” she asked, beginning to work at his buttons.

  “Oh, my,” he said. He hadn’t fully considered his own nakedness; he’d thought it was just hers that mattered. She managed to push his shirt back off his shoulders and mostly expose his chest, which to him looked silly and unadorned, dull above her more baroque design. She ran one hand through his hair, which made his scalp tingle. She lightly danced her touch up his sleeves to his biceps, and where her fingers came near to his underarms he got ticklish and began to laugh and he collapsed upon her.

  “You are a novice,” she said, with some disappointment, he thought. He wondered what he could do to pretend otherwise when the door below them flung open. Light off the grass swam into the chapel. Scraping noises, a dragged chair, some thumps, a few expressive sighs.

  Then Dirk heard the first declaration, and realized that Felix had escaped his other diversions and come to rehearse the Bach ’cello pieces again.

  “Shit,” whispered Hannelore, though her expression was mean and gleeful.

  Dirk had drawn back, though Felix wasn’t positioned far enough forward in the aisle to be able to see them even if he should glance up.

  Dirk pulled his shirt more or less back to rights and sat up very softly.

  “Coward.” Hannelore didn’t speak out loud, but he could see the word her mouth was making. She sat up softly, too. As the ’cello piece grew louder, she stood and beckoned to Dirk to follow her. Leaving her blouse and shoes where they were, she tiptoed back to the staircase. He hadn’t noticed that the stairs continued beyond the loft. Up they went, out of the gloom and into the stone bell tower that was open to the winds on four sides.

  “Someone will notice us!” he protested.

  “No one is around at this time of the day, and who would think to look up and see if someone had crept into the tower of this abandoned outbuilding?” She dropped her skirt and stepped forward over pigeon droppings and rotting coils of rope. She was entirely naked but for the mask of ferocity and charity upon her face. He froze as she removed his shirt and then dropped his leggings. “Do you want to do this or not?” she said. “I’m not persuaded. You have to persuade me.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I don’t know how.”

  “Is that so? I’d never have guessed; I thought you were Casanova’s cousin.”

  The wind sweeping up the lake played a tenderness upon the skin of his torso, his buttocks, his legs and forearms, it was a different attention than that which Hannelore was showing him. The effects were at odds; she was rough with him and the wind gentle, coercing; he couldn’t seem to decipher the moods of which, the needs and suggestions of either. The music, though distant, mounted to an urgent encouragement.

  “Is it that we are in an old church? Is that it?” said Hannelore in a dusky voice. She was handling him as if he were ingredients for an impromptu supper, hurriedly. “Are you afraid of some ancient threat of blasphemy? Copulation in the holy sanctuary?”

  He had no words anymore. A ratcheting itchiness inside nearly hurt, and he didn’t know how to relieve it. She was being kind and troublesome. Below Felix was making love to the ’cello with the assurance of a maestro. Dirk hated himself and wished he were anywhere else.

  “Don’t you believe in Christ?” she said, and rising on her toes, began to settle herself upon his prick. She was soft and annihilating, a damp wondrousness affording a new aspect of mystery. The surprise he felt was both elation and terror. That the world could turn itself inside out, pull itself through itself like a thread through a needle.

  He never answered her question, and she drew away from him, or he from her; he couldn’t tell even which muscles belonged to whom. “I can’t be bothered,” she said at last. “The miller’s son won’t strike me if he finds out, for your appetite and your fork are not at the same table.”

  She left him there, but not without kissing him first. She taught him how to kiss on the mouth. Perhaps if she had started there, things would have been different. He waited, naked, in the stone tower, slowly growing chilly, his penis clocking downward. He watched her hurry across the grass. Her blouse and her skirt were proper enough. She carried her shoes in her hand. She didn’t look back to see if he was watching her. She never spoke to him again.

  That night he wondered if he had some sort of obligation to find the miller’s son and kill him. Was that how it was done? But honor was a hard sum to do in one’s head when one has had no lessons in it, and he wasn’t sure whose honor had been besmirched. Perhaps it was his own.

  22.

  The summer had begun with a bear vandalizing a chapel associated with an obscure Protestant confession. It reached its apotheosis in a thunderstorm that rattled the windows in their casements and raged over the roof-beams of the schloss.

  The lightning was so insistent that Dirk in his cot thought to raise himself on one elbow and look across the taut forms of three restless laborers. In the final bed, high-lit with electrostatic flares as from giant lucifer matches, the farmhand and the seamstress were at it, roused to greater lust by the drama in the atmosphere. Oh, is that what is meant by making love, thought Dirk, and probably blushed.

  The lightning became more frequent. The thunder seemed to stop directly above the house. No stranger to summer storms, Dirk found this one too close, nearly taunting. Despite the activities across the room, he finally sat up in bed, found his clothes, adjusted his eye-patch, and left.

  He went down one staircase and felt safer. He went down the next and arrived in the kitchens. A light was on. He entered anyway.

  The ’cello player was foraging for bread and mustard and a bit of sausage. Dirk had never seen a member of the family or their guests in the kitchen, but Felix in his nightshirt and bare calves seemed unperturbed by the situation. “Are you underfed or over-excited?” he asked, holding up bread in one hand and some wurst in the other.

  Dirk shrugged. He accepted a hunk of bread and a heel of the sausage. They sat down together at a table.

  “These last days of summer, they always supply their strongest storms at night,” said Felix.

  Thinking of the aggressive coupling under the eaves, Dirk nodded.

  “Are you returning to Munich with the family? If so, perhaps I shall see you when next I come down from Wittenberg with Kurt. We leave tomorrow, you know.”

  “Kurt?”

  “The Baron in line—the Baron’s son. Surely you know Kurt?”

  “I don’t know the family,” mumbled Dirk. “I am a jack-of-all-trades, privy to no one’s attention but the overseer. I don’t know if I’ll be brought to Meersburg, or to Munich. Or perhaps I’ll be sent back to the village from which I came in the early summer.”

  “See if you can get a job being manservant to Kurt,” said Felix. “You would like Wittenberg.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “It’s full of music. You like music.”

  “I’m not sure that I do. I’m not sure that I have any feeling for music at all. I’m just interested in what it . . . what it . . .” He paused.

  “What it means?”

  “What it—suggests.”

  Felix grinned and leaned a little closer. “And what does it suggest? Are you suggestible?”

  “I don’t know. It seems to indicate . . .” He waved his hand in the air, spilling a blob of mustard on Felix’s knee. “Otherness. I don’t know how to say it. An otherness, an apartness—like what we know, but transformed somehow.”

  Felix leaned back in his chair, as if they were old companions. “Well, take it from me. You would enjoy Wittenberg. I could meet up with you there, too. You and I, I am guessing we are simpatico.”

  “I don’t know what that means, either.”

  Felix just smiled at his bread. Then he said, “Th
e world is breaking free of smoky Roman superstition and glassy Lutheran rectitude. The heyday of the French rationalists, that, too, is gone, gone as Napoleon. A new attention is being paid to how things seem and how they feel. Have you read Goethe? The Sorrows of Young Werther? It’s been taken up by university scholars of my generation, it proposes passion in life, not hesitation. It proposes engagement, not detachment. We must live life, not merely regard it. A happy satisfaction at being alive. Unless you kill yourself, of course, the way Werther does. But please don’t. We must be brave and try to find our way. It may not be the way proposed to us in the past. Don’t you think?”

  That was what Dirk had been attempting in the belfry of the abandoned Catholic chapel. His efforts hadn’t brokered a happy satisfaction at being alive.

  Felix grabbed Dirk’s hand and clasped it in both of his. Dirk stiffened. “Simpatico, it’s Italian for ‘sympathetic.’ Hearts beating to the same pulse. That’s what music does for one, you know—I mean, for two. For more. It trains hearts to lean in the same direction. Sympathetically.”

  Dirk pulled away. The lightning made a black-and-white image of Felix’s open face, his bed-tousled hair, the Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed the crust of bread. His skin from neck to the second button, for the first was open, was papery and slightly damp from the humidity in the summer kitchen.

  “Well, look me up if you come to Wittenberg, or I’ll see you in the Munich house, I expect, or the Meersburg salons. I’m a longtime hanger-on to this family. They’re good to guests,” said Felix, relenting. “There’s some ale in the cold cupboard, I believe. Pull two glasses for us.”

  Dirk pulled two steins of ale and set them both before Felix and turned away to climb the stairs in the darkness. The midnight lightning was over, the thunder receding. He could hear his heart. Whether it was sympathetic or not, he had no idea.

  23.

  He never did speak to Hannelore again, true, but that didn’t mean she had no effect on his life. Toward the latter part of the summer, in Meersburg, it became whispered loudly that the unmarried kitchen maid might be with child. Too early to show, but she was telling. The miller’s son, it seemed, had become a romantic casualty of the season and therefore he would accept no credit of paternity. Hannelore was keeping silent as to the identity of the father. When Baron von Koenig pressed the point, the overseer conducted interviews of the staff.

  It became apparent that someone had seen Hannelore leaving the defunct chapel by the lake, carrying her shoes, looking disheveled.

  Additionally, it was the opinion of many in the kitchens and stables that young Dirk Drosselmeier had been observed mooning about the girl from time to time.

  But further questioning revealed that Felix, the bosom chum of Kurt von Koenig, family scion, had been rehearsing with his instrument in the chapel all summer.

  A family retainer hastened to Wittenberg to resolve the matter. The advocate returned some days later with a statement. Felix had admitted the child to be his own, after all, and he supplied a settlement to be paid upon the unwed mother. Such things were done in that set, apparently.

  Dirk pondered this as he collected his items—three shirts now, and a buttonhook, and a junky old knife that needed sharpening. He remembered the walking stick that had belonged to the old man in the forest, the woodcutter. It was more useful now that Dirk was no longer the slender slip of a kid, but a young man, and ready for a young man’s life. At least he hoped so.

  For the first and only time, Dirk was called for an interview with the Baron. “Your last chance,” said Baron von Koenig, “to own up to your responsibility and to claim this child as your own.”

  “I was given to understand that your houseguest Felix has already confessed to that?”

  “Stahlbaum is a quixotic character. His motivations and his behavior are untrustworthy. Perhaps he was giving cover to you, as he could see for himself you are in no situation to take on a family. I understand from the maiden that he was friendly enough with you.”

  “Hannelore hasn’t named me as the father,” replied Dirk. He’d learned a little about dignity. “I’m not a father. Neither of her child nor of any other.”

  “Keep it like that, you’ll be a lot better off,” growled the Baron, who probably wasn’t such a bad sort, thought Dirk, but seemed to be tired of dealing with the progression of pregnancies that summertime at the lake perhaps provided all too regularly.

  “Am I to proceed with the household to the autumn address?”

  “I’d been inclined to bring you, but not now. Deserved or not, a shadow falls upon your reputation. We strive to be a strict Catholic household, at least in town. You wouldn’t think to return to your parsonage in Bavaria?”

  “If a scandal attaches to me? It would dishonor Pfarrer Johannes. And I’ve been given no useful message to deliver to him. So, no, I don’t think I ought to return.”

  “I supposed as much. Well, as it happens I was visiting a paper merchant in Meersburg to arrange for a volume of the scientific findings among some friends of mine. Adventures in atmospherics. The merchant mentioned he is in need of an assistant. I shall send you there with a letter of controlled enthusiasm. Maybe he’ll find you suitable. If not, God be with you upon your own road, if He can find you there.”

  The Padlocked Garden

  24.

  Dirk was surprised to find how deeply he resented being let go from the retinue that served the von Koenigs. With only a letter of introduction in hand and some back pay in his pocket, he was turned out upon the dusty road in the direction of Meersburg. It wasn’t to be a long journey, but he found it grating to watch the family entourage wheel past him without acknowledging him. Salt and brine them all.

  An older farmer, carrying thumps of rain-dampened hay in a wagon, picked up Dirk eventually. “Going near enough Meersburg to make it worth your while, and the company is welcome, if you’re going to talk,” said the fellow. It seemed, though, that he didn’t really care if Dirk talked. It was more that he wanted an audience for his soliloquy. So Dirk fed him the occasional interrogative syllable, tinder in an oven to keep it going, and more or less failed to listen to what the farmer said.

  However, when they passed a substantial church building positioned over the lake, a great basilica structure painted a pale strawberry, the farmer commented, “You want religious paintings and such, there’s the place. The whole congress of heaven is painted floating on clouds right above you. The ceiling of the nave. You’d think the wind up there would have disturbed at least someone’s flowing robes so you could get a good look at the particulars of angels, but God’s uncanny breeze keeps everyone modest.”

  “You can let me off here, I would like to make a visit,” said Dirk.

  “Not to bother with all that. Pilgrims stopped coming a few years back when the Cistercians were chased out. The place is boarded up. The canopy of heaven will still be aloft, but you can’t get in the door to see it.”

  The things that could be seen versus the ones that could only be imagined. Dirk still felt he didn’t have a grasp on what divided the two armies. Was it a function of God’s revelation, or of personal talent at seeing? Things invisible to see, they were still there, weren’t they? Birds maybe could see them. Gnarly schwarzkopfs hiding maliciously in the underbrush could spy on cold transparent truths. Old farm-dames with second sight, maybe. But Dirk couldn’t see the invisible, not yet. He couldn’t even see plain old what-not.

  “And so, here we part. I’m headed out the road toward Daisendorf, and must be there before dusk turns to night. Meersburg starts up beyond those fields. Can you make that out?”

  “That much, yes.”

  The farmer bit his moustache. “I am obliged for the company, young man.”

  “It was no bother to me.”

  Dirk dismounted. He heard the farmer chuckle and mutter to himself something like, “No bother to you! Well, that puts my mind at rest.”

  The vineyards gave way to a medieval gate. Meers
burg mounted from the lakeshore in switchback lanes and stepped alleys. Overhanging half-timbered buildings loomed in a rangy, busybody manner—or that is how it seemed to Dirk. (He was beginning to pay attention to how things seemed.) Citizens were disinclined to give directions, but eventually Dirk found his way to an alley off a cul-de-sac road above the lake, on the far end of town. It was almost too late to knock, but he had no other ideas for lodging, so knock he did.

  The burgher answered his own door. He took the proffered note and read it in the falling light. “I’m not the governor of the poorhouse nor do I host a reformatory for lounge-abouts, but come in,” he grumped. He was untucked in his dress—he’d gotten up from table. A nearly visible fug of sauerbraten and wet dog hung agreeably in the passage. The home beyond its severe façade seemed comfortable enough. Mitteleuropean bourgeoiserie. Dirk was brought round through some pantries to a kitchen, empty but for a few prowling cats. A desiccated fowl from an earlier meal sat in a covered pot. “I’m at table with the little lords,” said Herr Pfeiffer. “The Frau is indisposed and seconded to her chamber. Help yourself to some supper and find a blanket in the chest. The morning will be time enough to sort out your particulars.”

  Dirk ate and then he stretched out among shadows and the drying pots some kitchen maid had already seen to. How many times in a life, he thought, will I lie down in a darkness whose character I cannot imagine, to see what daybreak reveals of my new circumstances? Or is that every day of my life?

  He itemized what he could tell of this establishment by stretching out on a stone floor. A smell of char and of some oily polish, perhaps for leather or laundry. The distant sound of young boys laughing and thumping up a staircase. A sense of guardedness here, bolts thrown at the kitchen door as well as the street door. But the upper part of the window remained unshuttered, so the moon traced three angled crosses upon the slate floor.

  In the morning his life might change again. There was something new to learn as long as he felt recurringly off the mark, belated, distracted. Walking with an invisible stone in his shoe, or speaking with a stone in his mouth and mistaking it for his tongue.