Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

  25.

  He met the boys in the morning. They proved to be little garlic scapes. That Franz, that Moritz. Overly beloved, poorly handled, noisy as Romany brats, catapulting shots of black cherry conserve at the cats. Dirk feared he had been let into the house in order to become their tutor. A grave mistake if so, as he had nothing to teach them.

  “What’s this?” said Moritz the Visigoth, rampaging through Dirk’s small satchel and discovering Dirk’s knife.

  “Give it me,” said Franz, the Mongol Horde. He was eight years old, the big brother. His columnar head sported a froth of perfect curls that grew straight up but didn’t spread. He looked like the top inches of a stein of foamy beer. He snatched at Moritz.

  “Mine,” said Dirk, lunging. “Leave my things be.”

  “It has a face, a nasty imp head. What’s it got between its knees, eh?” asked Franz, peering.

  “More than you have between yours,” said Moritz, who was only five.

  “He’ll slice you of his own accord if you test him,” said Dirk. “Hand it here.” He folded the leather wrap around it again.

  “Are you Papi’s new run-around?” asked Franz. “You’ll have thighs like Eastertide hams, going up and down these streets. No one lasts more than a few months. We can show you where Papi hides the key to the wine cellar.”

  “This is my room now,” said Dirk. “It’s been given me while I’m here, and you aren’t allowed. Stay out.”

  “It’s our house, we can go anywhere.” Moritz climbed up on the windowsill and Dirk pulled him off lest he fall three flights.

  Franz said, “We can come with you to pick up the bleaching compound today if you want company. I can show you how to find your way. Moritz can show you how to get lost.” Moritz was poking the rest of Dirk’s deflated satchel with his foot.

  “We make the best paper outside of Munich, and also including Munich, too,” said Moritz.

  “If you’re not fired by then, you can come to Oktoberfest with us, and get bread dumplings,” said Franz. “Our mother won’t go; she thinks it’s a festival for peasants. So Papi won’t go either, he can’t. He says Mutter comes first and the world follows if it dares, that is what he says.”

  “When she’s not listening he says that. When she is, he says, Darling Mutti!”

  “He loves her, you clod, what’s wrong with a husband loving his wife?” The older brother whistled derisively. “Come, why don’t we let the rabbits out of the hutches and see if any peregrines notice.” They tore away. Dirk tidied up and went for his assignment. Herr Pfeiffer was waiting for him in a small office off the stairs.

  26.

  “You come with a lukewarm recommendation from the Baron, but beggars can’t be choosers, and we’ve exhausted the stock of available help nearby,” said Gerwig Pfeiffer. The man was a cheery enough sort, if beleaguered. Perhaps his establishment had more work than it could handle. He rubbed his scalp until his hair was flyaway thistle, and mopped his sweating temples with a cloth he kept in a saucer of water. “Everyone wants to read these days, Dirk, can’t keep up,” he explained. “Gluts of broadsheets. For us merchants of paper, it keeps idle hands busy and it renders holidays scarce.”

  “How do you know the von Koenig family?”

  “You mean how does the merchant hobnob with the nobleman? I sell paper to the Baron for the printing of transcripts of his scientific companions. The wealthy have peculiar hobbies. Commerce is commerce.” Pfeiffer began to lay out for Dirk a few metes and bounds of the trade. Dirk prepared to earn his keep through the gathering, soaking, sieving, pressing, and bleaching of rags into paper. And the sizing, trimming, bundling, carting, and delivery of it. At least until something better might offer itself.

  Pfeiffer broached the topic of general finance. What constituted a profit; why profits ought to be reinvested into the business. Who kept the books (Pfeiffer himself) and the keys to the warehouse (Pfeiffer again). Who brought the takings to the countinghouse (guess who).

  As Pfeiffer was about to go into a disquisition about the autumn schedule, the door behind Dirk opened. Swiveling on his stool, Dirk prepared to stand up in case it was the mistress of the household. A swish of skirting brushed against the doorsill. She may have been startled to find a visitor, as she didn’t come in. The door closed softly.

  “Ah. So now you’ve witnessed my wife,” said Pfeifer. “The lovely Frau Pfeiffer. She enjoys being shy. What are your experiences with bookkeeping?”

  “I’m not good with children.”

  “That’s not what I asked you.”

  “I can try to learn about bookkeeping, I guess.”

  “Numbers obey. At least something adds up around here.”

  27.

  Shy meant more than shy; it meant clandestine. Dirk was lodged in the Pfeiffer establishment for almost a week before he caught a real glimpse of Frau Pfeiffer. Well, he had the place itself to learn as well as its ménage.

  The boys dragged Dirk throughout the house, upstairs and down. A cook lumbered in and baked and roasted things and left them out on the table at noontime. A girl drifted by at dusk to wash down the boys and wash up the dishes and store anything uneaten. Though Dirk sometimes heard steps upstairs, or in the hall behind closed doors, Frau Pfeiffer failed to emerge.

  He didn’t know if the establishment was characteristic of the area—he’d so little experience with houses. (The von Koenig schloss outside Überlingen had seemed like a palace-in-training, while the Pfarrer’s cramped suite of rooms had been too spare of comfort.)

  The property, though shabby, was generous enough to have not one but two wide buildings squeezed upon it. One behind the other, with a space between them. The tall, timbered house and offices fronted the road with a formal walled garden conferring a sense of status—slightly shabby status, because the garden was overgrown and the gate to the road was in need of painting. In the shallow courtyard behind the house, though, scrappy chickens pecked and herbs were hung to dry and broken equipment fell into further disrepair.

  Beyond this cloistered utility yard loomed the twin structure, of similar dimensions to the house. It was fronted with open porches looking down at rusting harrows, a butter churn, and stacks of firewood. For another family it had been a genuine barn; Pfeiffer apparently used some of the upper rooms for the storage of supplies. As Dirk wasn’t sent out there, he didn’t know for sure.

  Most of the houses in Meersburg proper had swollen to the margins of their properties, it seemed. This short way out from the center of town, the walled garden with a street gate was an anomaly: neither rural orchard nor coachyard. The boys told Dirk that their mother often spent whole days in the garden. No windows from the house looked out on it, and the walls were high enough to promise privacy all around—excepting the gate, of course.

  On the sixth day, a Monday, a girl arrived to do the washing. She was a pasty thing with hair tucked so tightly under her cap Dirk couldn’t guess at its color. She hollered at Dirk to clear the boys away, they were splashing in the water, which was a labor to draw and to heat, or didn’t he know that?

  He took them out. They walked the streets of the upper town and then wandered down to the water. The great steamboat that had brought Dirk here at the start of the summer was nearing the jetty, making a silhouette in front of the ice-grey Swiss Alps in the distance. Dirk and the boys climbed on the rocks, enjoying the spray and the noon light. After that, they made a circuit of the town by the lanes that had grown up outside the medieval walls. By the time he had exhausted the boys and returned them to the household, the laundry maid was done with the washing and had already hung it to dry on ropes slung between house and barn. She sat down with Dirk, the boys, and their father, and they all made a late lunch out of headcheese, mustard, and brown bread.

  “Take them up to the nursery and read to them or something,” said Pfeiffer when the meal was through. “I have to go see someone about an unpaid bill of lading.”

  “I don’t think I am a governess,”
said Dirk.

  “I don’t think so either, but try,” replied his boss.

  The nursery, which doubled as a haphazard schoolroom, faced the courtyard between house and barn. Settling the boys with graphite and paper—there was always a lot of paper in this house—he turned when flashes of light began to arc across the walls. In the summer heat that lingered into early autumn, the glaring white sheets had already dried, it seemed. With large motions, the laundress was harvesting the dried sheets and table runners.

  “Tillie,” called Moritz, “let me see if I can hit you through the sheet with this ball!”

  “If you muck up this laundry,” began the girl, Tilda, but left the threat unstated.

  “Sit down and draw,” said Dirk, “or I’ll teach you something about hitting.”

  He stood at the windowsill and watched. The sheets were like pieces of cloth paper, in a way. Shining panels. He noticed four hands above the lines, untying knots, folding the bedding away. Frau Pfeiffer was helping.

  He might catch a glimpse of her if the laundry came down in the right sequence. He watched as, behind the remaining panels, the two women worked together, folding great cloths in a kind of shadow-puppetry dance sequence.

  Now this one must be the last. He would see what she looked like. Perhaps she was monstrous, and kept to herself out of courtesy for others.

  Not yet—what revealed itself wasn’t Frau Pfeiffer but yet another panel more like a banner than bedding. That is to say, it was a sheet upon which something had been painted. Dirk made a tchhh sound, and the boys looked up.

  “Good work, Mutti!” cried one of them.

  “Whatever is that?” asked Dirk.

  Tapered hands, more refined than a washerwoman’s, loosened the pennant from its ropes. The sheet swooped around in a zephyr caused by quick movement, and Frau Pfeiffer disappeared through a door into the barn before Dirk could learn anything of her but that she could move swiftly.

  “It is Mutter’s drawing, and here’s mine,” said Franz, so Moritz pushed in front of his big brother to show his own work.

  “But what was it a painting of?” asked Dirk. “I couldn’t see.”

  “Oh, something,” replied Franz, “or something else.”

  28.

  Several mornings after this, Dirk approached the small salon where Herr Pfeiffer oversaw the affairs of his household and his trade. The door was halfway open. Dirk paused, not to eavesdrop but to wait for an acceptable moment to enter.

  “But you’ve taken in another hobbled goose, I hear.” A woman’s tones, arresting to Dirk because they didn’t sound like anything he’d ever heard before. It reminded him of his first exposure to the voice of the ’cello. Hers was a pearly instrument that made of workaday German something more velveteen, throaty. What she said, the way she put things. Emphases, sudden diminuendos. “I’ve seen him, you know. He wears a mark of the woods.”

  “He’ll do just fine here. Trust me on this. He’s not a local boy.”

  “I can tell that. Is he altogether put together?”

  “He’s a good lad, and no known family. Don’t fuss about it.”

  “Well.” There was a silence and the sound of fingers drumming on a tabletop. “I am trying to ask you your business with this boy.”

  “Ah, Nastaran. He is taking over the duties of the lad who had to leave to tend to his grandfather in the Thurgau.”

  “But sleeping here in our own home? Is that proper? Are our affairs to be public property?”

  “The past assistants were all local, as you know very well. They all had plenty of scope for backstairs chatter if they’d been inclined. But they weren’t, and this one isn’t either, I can tell. Now, were you here to ask for more supplies?” The husband’s voice tired and consoling. “I will get you what you need.”

  “You can’t give me what I need.” Oh, the ’cello in that sentence. “But you can get me a pot of blue the next time you are in Munich. I’d welcome that.”

  “What shade?”

  The silence went on for so long that Dirk began to inch backward. Then she said, “I want the sky, Gerwig. Either you know the color of the sky or you don’t.”

  “You should rely on it that I don’t, my love. Give me a sample of cloth or paper and I’ll see if I can match it. I’ll undoubtedly get it wrong, but perhaps not so wrong as to cause offense.”

  She was up and through the door so quickly that she’d have bumped into Dirk had he not retreated. All he saw was an ebbing of dress material on the bottom step before his eye could really focus. She rose out of sight as if in an updraft. He waited a moment and then approached the chamber, rapping lightly.

  “Oh, you just missed the Frau. She is longing to meet you,” said Pfeiffer, peaceably enough.

  “I’m surprised not to have had the pleasure yet.”

  “Oh, well, pleasure.” The husband was ruminative, riffling some papers. “She is a retiring type, the Frau Pfeiffer. I can tell she will come forward soon. She isn’t used to having someone else live in the house. Our previous help has always come from nearby, and left in the evenings.”

  “I don’t enter the barn. But in the house you haven’t told me what rooms to avoid, if she doesn’t care for company.”

  “She’ll do the avoiding, never fear.” But he relented. “She’s from a different tradition. She will have nothing against you, but your lack of connection with anyone we know personally will take some time for her to overcome. In her society, she wouldn’t have generally met someone like you.” He sighed, and added almost under his breath, “Or me.”

  “I am uncertain . . .”

  “She keeps to the garden and her own chamber, across the hall from mine.” He looked up under his bushy brows. “You’ll have deduced that we accommodate Frau Pfeiffer. I’m sure at your age you know what relations between a man and a woman are.”

  “Oh, I’m not questioning—and, no, I’m hardly in the situation—”

  He laughed. “Well, if you don’t, you will soon enough. It helps keep the peace that the Frau and I should retire to separate sleeping chambers. But don’t worry about affection. I’m devoted to her, and always will be.”

  “It’s hardly my place—”

  Gerwig Pfeiffer stopped humming. “You’re quite right. Let’s to this day’s lesson in availabilities of glue, shall we? There are three sorts we use, depending both on the wetness of the atmosphere and the quality of the rag content we’ve boiled up. See here.” They bent over their work. Upstairs, a door slammed, once, then twice more, as if practicing outrage.

  29.

  The next morning Herr Pfeiffer had to be out to meet a steamship arriving with a shipment of rags. It was a drizzly day, and the boys were cross to be kept inside. Dirk hunted about the nursery for something to entertain them. He discovered a stack of woodcut prints. They’d been discarded from some printing job, probably for misalignment, as they all tilted at the same angle. The boys had used charcoal crayon on some of them. Dirk selected an image of a man beating a donkey. He cut the page up into fourteen or fifteen segments and shuffled them. “Now you are to put it back into the right form,” he told them.

  “I wonder if the donkey will have run away,” said Moritz.

  “How could he do that?” asked Franz.

  “Dirk’s scissors have cut through the harness.”

  The boys weren’t much amused by the puzzle, but they dallied and fought over it. The pieces of paper got gummy and stuck to their fingertips. It was a bit of a disaster.

  Then a voice from across the utility courtyard: Frau Pfeiffer calling for assistance. Her tone was even. Moritz rose to go, but Franz was bigger and spilled him on the floor to get by. The older brother ran upstairs at once—a covered bridge-way spanned the courtyard on the third level, so those on high floors in either building wouldn’t need to go down and up so many stairs.

  Moritz was sulking when Franz returned, carrying a small clay flask with a wide neck. “Mutter would like you to open this, if you can.” br />
  He took it. Something heavy and liquid inside. The mouth of the jug had been covered with a square of cheesecloth. Wax had been melted across the top to keep the vessel secured and, perhaps, the liquid from spilling over or drying out or spoiling. “What is it, do you know?”

  “Paint, I think. But I don’t know the color.”

  Dirk tried to wrestle the wax off, but it had hardened to stone. He pulled the leatherfold out of his pocket and unwrapped his gnome-head knife, and he set to work carving chunks of wax off the edge.

  “Let me,” said Moritz. “Franz got to bring the paint. It’s my turn.”

  “I’m bigger,” said Franz. “You’d only stab yourself.”

  Dirk wouldn’t hear of it. “It’s not a very sharp knife, but it’s sharp enough. It could slip. What does your mother use the paint for?”

  “To paint with,” said Franz.”

  “Well, think of that. I really meant: What does she paint?” His hand slipped and a short line of crimson showed up along the edge of his thumb.

  “It’s red paint, then,” said Franz, not understanding.

  “It’s the red paint we all have inside us.” Dirk went to the window, to rinse his hand in the rainwater that still splashed down.

  “Stop,” cried Franz.

  “It’s only blood,” said Dirk, but pivoted as a chair overturned.

  Moritz had grabbed the blackened knife and was hounding his brother with it. “You never let me do anything you rotten stinking shitty!”

  “Gott in Himmel, give me that!” roared Dirk, and joined the chase. The boys were too quick, and tumbled out of the room and halfway up the stairs hollering.

  With Dirk only steps behind, the brothers raced across the rain-spattered span. They careered onto the porch of the barn’s third level, where they were stopped by the emergence of Frau Pfeiffer. Dirk recaptured the knife by encircling it with one hand. With his other hand he froze Moritz’s fist to prevent an accident. But then it seemed everything had frozen for an instant, a tableau made more theatrical by the sound of rain.