Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(10)

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, Fr?ulein. 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 Gro?mutter 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 experience. 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.





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 fa?ade 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.