Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(2)

The old man was spare of speech. When he opened his mouth it was often to contradict the old woman. He might have been cross by nature or maybe his lumpy shoulder gave him bother. He didn’t like to wring the neck of a barnyard chicken when one was needed for the pot. He made the old woman do that job. But once during a hard winter, when a rogue wolf came prowling, he managed to trap it and kill it with his axe.

The wolf bled to death under the moon. In the morning, the old woman broke off a portion of frozen blood. It was like a cracked brown plate. She brought it home to thicken the evening stew.

“Papi, get out the carving knife if we’re to have sausage meat from that hairy old sinner,” she said.

“I’d rather drag the carcass to the village and sell it, and buy something already minced and spiced,” he replied.

“No one would give a pfennig or a ham bone for that mangy creature. You are a coward still. I’ll butcher the beast myself if you won’t.”

“Let me come with you to the village, Papi,” said Dirk.

“No one’s going to the village,” shouted the old woman. She named the rules. “Nobody here knows where it is.” That was a regular lie to make Dirk shut up—they all knew that the old man went for provisions every now and then.

The old woman hung the wolf by its back legs so it could finish bleeding into a bucket. The chickens and the barn cat and the cow didn’t seem to mind.

As the dead beast twisted on its truss, sometimes the upside-down head turned toward Dirk, who sat on the milking stool and watched. The eyes had grown filmy and red. Some flies that wintered in the barn crawled upon the wolf’s snout, but the corpse eyes didn’t blink. What are you seeing behind that calm red death, wondered Dirk. Where are you now that you aren’t bothered by the twitching of flies?



Dirk. The old man and the old woman. Birth and death. Birth and death and the woods all around. And questions that never got answered, because they couldn’t easily be asked.





2.


You might be expecting to hear something about Dirk himself now. But what is there to say?

He was a boy who was short when he was younger but grew a little bit each year. He had a hand at the end of each arm, and above his nose, two eyes spaced evenly enough apart not to be upsetting. If he was outside, his hair color changed from dusty wheat in the summer noontimes to red-gold in sunset light. When inside, his hair was more brown, like an old master sketch done in Conté crayon. His incidental smile, if it broke through, was pleasing because it was rare. He smelled like dirty clothes when his clothes were dirty. On bathing day he smelled like raw boy.

He didn’t look like the old woman or the old man, not only because he was a foundling, but for that other, obvious reason: When does a boy ever really look like an adult until he gets there?

If he gets there.

The old man taught him his catechism and his letters. The old woman taught him how every soup begins with an onion. The old man showed him how to carve a potato, and said one day he might get a knife of his own that could carve wood, but not today.

In the long, dark winter evenings, while the old man shaped animals and other figures from knots of pine, the old woman told Dirk stories.

This made the old man impatient. “It’s a sin to tell a lie,” he said.

“Another sin to deny the truth,” she replied.

The stories involved princesses and disguises, castles and enchantments, third sons out to make their way in the world, ancient witches, cunning magicians, animal patrons and guides. Almost all of the stories started with the death of a mother in childbirth. “Is that how my mother died?” he asked the old woman one night.

The old man went out of the waldhütte and slammed the door, even though frost was in the air.

“No one knows his own story, and that’s the way of it, unless you make it up yourself,” she said at last. “Now, that girl in the red cape; there’s a wolf coming along. Just like the one we made sausage out of. Listen to what happens next.”

He listened.

And all this was in 1808, or so, in Bavaria.





3.


When Dirk had grown about as tall as a broom handle, he awoke one night to the sound of muttering below. He rolled on his pallet of straw in the loft and put his ear to a crack in the boards. The old man was fighting with the old woman. Dirk picked out a few words—“necessary”—“feeble”—“scarcity.” Whispering can disguise the shape of syllables, but not of mood. Dirk heard fear, and blaming.

It reminded him of something. But of what did he have experience but this hut in the shrouded forest, these two elderly keepers? Only the occasional Bible story that Papi read slowly by firelight. Elijah in disguise, Isaac and Abraham. Or the tales that the old woman told, of the goose that laid the golden eggs, of the twelve brothers turned into swans. The stepmother who stewed her children and served them to her husband for supper.

A thin catalog by which to reference human charity and suffering.

The old woman’s sniveling gave way at last to an aching silence. None of the old man’s heavy snoring, which meant he was lying awake uncomforted, staring into the dark.

In the morning, the old man said, “Dirk, today I will take you into the forest and teach you to fell a tree. It is time . . .”

He did not say what it was time for.