Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(14)

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.





17.


Another two or three days, or four. Nights in sheds, and once in the back room of a tavern, among barrels of beer that made him drunk on the fumes. Along the Wolfsbach River toward Lindau, then down to a great lake, the Obersee section of the Bodensee—or Lake Constance as he also heard it called. He kept northwest along its shores to pretty Friedrichshafen, crinkled, pleated with sharp shadow in the dawn light. Now that the forest had given way to open spaces again, Dirk could better understand the height of the terrain from which he had descended. Though disappeared from view, the mountains rose in his mind like flat friezes of snow and rock. They hinted nothing of the lives lived within their crags and crevices. All the silent fish and unheard birds. The renegade wolf, the rogue king stag, the parliament of bears.

Dirk walked to the edge of the land to see how it managed to lose itself in the water. There, as luck or grace would have it, he was offered passage on a steamboat if he might help an elderly dame and her crippled son manage their valises. And so he made his way to Meersburg handily enough.





18.


Meersburg, seen from across the water. A small walled city in two parts, a lower town near the lake and an upper area bristling with municipal stateliness. A stone jetty reached toward them as they approached from the east. A breakwater of sorts. Boys were fishing there, and men repairing nets. The quay beyond, a staging area for commerce and drama. “Mind your wallet in this crowd,” said the old Dame as she departed. But he had no wallet to worry over.

Either Dirk hadn’t listened correctly or Pfarrer Johannes himself hadn’t understood. According to the dockworkers on the quay, the local Bishop’s palace had been appropriated for civic uses a decade or so earlier. True, the Roman Catholic Bishop, whose seat had been relocated to Constance across the lake, had indeed been seen in Meersburg earlier that season. Now, however, he was taking a few weeks as the guest of a wealthy family who repaired annually to their lakeside schloss some distance west of the city walls.

A cheery farmer offered Dirk a ride in a cart heaped with dung. By late afternoon, Dirk had escaped the cloud of flies and made his way to a pair of gates. Beyond the iron fretwork, the house looked like a generous slice of old creamy egg-bread set upon the flashing blue tablecloth of the lake. All the flourishes of iron seemed to Dirk like the alphabet of an unfamiliar script. Its message was clear, though: Stay Away.

Ah, but I have a job to do, said Dirk to the gate, and pulled on a bell-rope.

Dirk had long since realized he was talking to himself in moments like this, so he wasn’t surprised that the gate didn’t reply.

An underling scurried to work the latch. Dirk was led to a side door, where he was interviewed by an overseer of some sort. Dirk was told: “The good Bishop is indeed in residence, but His Excellency is at his oblations. You will repair to the kitchens. You will take a meal and wait for a reply. If the Bishop needs time to compose his thoughts, you will take a bed in the servants’ quarters.”

Mercy, a real bed: That would be a first.

The kitchen proved a well-scrubbed inferno of roasting meats. The property’s extensive staff seemed accustomed to visitors, and no one stared at Dirk or talked to him. A fleshy young damsel with hot pink cheeks, her bare arms freckled with orange, slapped before him a dish of veal stew with potato dumplings. He ate with gusto. A youth in a blooded apron bolted through from some stables with the news that the Baron’s son and his university entourage had just arrived unannounced and would be sat at table that evening. Eight more heads. “Ach,” said the head cook, “I am to prepare vegetables and potatoes with what, my toes, while my hands are finishing the strudel?”

“I can peel potatoes,” said Dirk. He took out his gnome-hasped knife and pushed aside his bowl for later.

Because the Bishop sent word that there’d be no immediate reply to Pfarrer Johannes Albrecht’s request for compensation for damages, Dirk Drosselmeier might have left the schloss von Koenig that evening. But the idea of the young kitchen maid—wringing bread flour out of towels in the doorway—gave Dirk pause. As he delayed, he was put to work again, and so without a formal arrangement he became a member of the summer staff.

Dirk fell in love, first, with the notion of his own bed, which stood in a row of five in one of the men’s dormitories above the kitchens. It came with its own pillow and its own hay mattress under striped ticking. After a while Dirk became enamored, second, with the notion of sharing this bed with someone. The pink-vermilion kitchen assistant, Hannelore, so often stood in his path, scowling and smelling delectably of onions and rampion, that he wondered if she ought to be his first. He was uncertain how to begin.





19.


Upon a knoll overlooking the lake, quite apart from the schloss, a Catholic chapel minded its own business under shaggy hemlocks. The von Koenig dynasty once must have adhered to Rome, though to judge by the look of decay no one was currently devout. Or not in the summertime.

Dirk had no language for architecture. The building was small. Its bell tower was capped with a wooden dome in the shape of a turnip, through neglect listing as a real turnip will. Narrow colored-glass windows lanceted the stone walls, but from the outside they looked mostly umber. As the doors to the place remained locked, he could neither confirm nor ruin his uncertain faith by seeing for the first time sunlit stained-glass windows from the inside.