Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(15)

One afternoon toward the height of summer, when the dogs lay about drooling into their shadows, Dirk took his leave of the pantries. He was keeping an eye out for Hannelore, who sometimes strolled down to the boathouse with an expression that suggested a winsome sort of boredom. Dirk was passing the vine-gripped chapel when he drew up short. The door stood open, and a single voice issued from the shadows. The noise was plangent, persuasive, but of what? Unforgettable—indeed, he never did forget it, his whole life long. Told sharply never to approach or address the von Koenig family or their guests, Dirk nonetheless was drawn in. He stood and stared with his eye, but his ears were staring harder.

A figure with rolling locks was hunched over a stringed instrument of unusual size. Of music, Dirk had known only the reedy wheeze of Pfarrer Johannes’s harmonium, with its tendency to bust a valve and leave the parish chromatically impoverished as it brayed through the militance of foursquare anthems.

This sound rolled forth. The strung melody seemed just the length of a line as sung by a human, breaking where a human voice would break for breath. As his eye adjusted to the shadows, Dirk saw the musician—a young man in a high-collared white shirt and billowy sleeves rolled to his elbows—who was caressing the exposed sternum of the instrument with a bow. He might have been bestowing loving attentions to a kneeling figure. Dust in the nearly empty room swirled around him; colored light from an Annunciation window made him crimson; from a Transfiguration, verdigris.

He finished at last, that crimson and copper-green one, and turned to Dirk.

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” said Dirk.

“I didn’t stop till I was through,” replied the man. The voice was refined, the glance bold. “You look as if you’ve seen a doppelg?nger.”

“I should go.”

“I’ll play another in a moment. I’m resting the pads of my fingers. Out of practice.”

“What is it?”

“Bach.”

“No, I mean—?”

“A violoncello. You’ve never seen a ’cello?” Dirk shook his head. “Come, have a look.”

“How does it do that? How do you do it?”

“Bach is the genius; the ’cello is his voice. I’m only the keyhole through which it pours. Mostly I try to keep out of the way and let the message work through me.”

This was beyond Dirk. “But it sounds—” He couldn’t find the way to say it. Some memory of—something—speaking beneath or without words. “Bach is a Christian musician,” he tried, flailing.

“Yes, Bach is Christian, but the ’cello suites are more like Euclidean arguments.”

“I don’t know what you mean. What do the suites argue?”

“I don’t know, but they do it so convincingly! Don’t you agree?”

The statement seemed nonsense—how could you be convinced by something wordless? Yet Dirk paused, and then nodded.

The man began to tighten the pegs on the head of the ’cello, coaxing the instrument into tune. “I’m Felix,” he said, between repeated iterations of nearly the same note. “At Wittenberg with the Baron’s son. Guest of the household.”

“I’m nobody,” said Dirk.

“A music lover, anyway. Want to hear another? The E-flat major.” Without waiting for an answer, he lifted his chin and raised his bow, and he brought forth the haunted disquisition. Dirk settled on a bench at the side and closed his eye. Luminous colored patterns played upon his more capable eyelid as, outside, clouds shuttered and unshuttered the light through some Revelation or other.





20.


Upon leaving the church, Felix said, “I come here often to practice because the sound against the stone is profound.”

“Oh,” said Dirk.

“I’m told to put the key here,” said Felix, showing Dirk where it was hidden. “Come see me again. I shall play more for you.”

“I don’t know if I can tolerate more,” said Dirk. But perhaps that sounded rude.

“You can tolerate more,” said Felix. “I’ll prove it to you.”



That evening the Bishop departed for Meersburg, and thence, it was said, across the great lake to Constance. The subject of a reply to Pfarrer Johannes hadn’t been broached again. This left Dirk as an independent lad upon his own road, as Pfarrer Johannes wasn’t going to come after him any more than the old man and old woman in the forest had done.

Dirk wandered by the lake edge, hoping Hannelore might happen along. Sharpening the horizon to knife-edge, a moon was rising in a sky tinted Siberian iris, making of the water of Obersee a black restlessness.

The world was a set of alternations, resistance and persistence, writ up in lake and the distant Alpine peaks of eastern Switzerland. In fact, the world was no easier to understand than Bach.

It seemed that the world was no more wonderful than Bach.

It was no less wonderful, either.

Magnificent imperturbability, exactly sized, one to the other.

What did that mean about Bach, about the world?





21.


He lay down with music in his mind, but not many thoughts about it. If there were words with which to consider music, he didn’t know them. He thought of Felix bending over the ’cello and coaxing from it such testimonies of longing. Or perhaps there was no such thing as meaning to be found in those lines—not aspiration, not any human feeling. Perhaps the suites were just congeries of certain notes shaped by different keys and modalities. Nothing more than that.