Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(18)

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, “The 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.”