Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(25)

32.


He didn’t eat with the family. He didn’t eat with the help. Somehow he didn’t fit in with either. This seemed the usual way in his life, and he didn’t mind.

The Pfeiffer family lived close to the bone. Their home was large, handed down to them from some forebear, but it was in need of attention. Walls that hadn’t been whitewashed since the turn of the century were mottled with a green rash. Windows with cracked panes were fitted with cedar shakes. Dirk suspected subsidence in one corner of the house, as all the balls and tops that the boys dropped tended to roll toward that quarter.

In the first month alone, two separate chairs lost their footing and deposited colleagues or family upon the floor.

Despite the pleasant commotion and daily decay, Herr Pfeiffer managed to run a business. He worked from home many days, dispatching Dirk to deliver a bill or to collect a shipment of supplies. Sometimes the paterfamilias oversaw processes at the rag baths, which were housed in an old fishing shed near the jetty. On these days, Frau Pfeiffer kept to upstairs chambers. She read light fictions and sometimes could be heard weeping over them. The housemaid rolled her eyes and the boys ignored her, and pestered Dirk instead.

“Are they going off to kindergarten soon?” Dirk asked Herr Pfeiffer one day when a nasty autumn storm looked to be blowing in across the lake—some Alpine drama heading north. The threat was keeping everyone housebound.

“Oh, no. Mutter wouldn’t have that,” he said.

“Never?”

“Never so far. Moritz, he isn’t suitable.”

“Then they will want a tutor?” Dirk was risking his own employment, as he knew himself to be unequal to the task.

The Frau chose this moment to appear upon the stairs. She paused, struck by some private consternation. A non sequitur would result, Dirk predicted, and it did. “The moon bowled down the length of the Thurgau slopes last night.”

“Did it now,” said her husband. “You were up late, to notice that.”

“Is he questioning the boys’ training?”

“I mean no harm,” said Dirk, addressing her for the first time.

She continued looking at Pfeiffer. “You’ve only to move an inch one way, and all the world shifts an inch in the other direction.”

“I’m afraid it’s coming to that time of the year,” he said, shuffling some papers. “You’ll be all right for a week. Dirk will be here.”

“Dirk,” she said. Now she turned to look at him, and proceeded to the bottom step. “Is he diligent, Gerwig? Dirk, are you diligent?”

“I am attentive,” said Dirk, hoping that was the right answer.

“He’ll do just fine.” Pfeiffer sighed. “It’s only a week, Nastaran.”

She moved on in a soft whuffing of scarves, and went out into the walled garden. She was framed by the open door. A needling rain was beginning to fall, and winds stirred the leaves of the Russian olive tree, which made behind her a pattern of irregular chevrons, silvery and silky. She opened up her hands as if to collect pearls liquefying from the sky.

“I never came across the name Nastaran before,” he said.

“Persian,” replied Herr Pfeiffer. “I am told that, in the tongue of her homeland, it means ‘wild rose.’”

“Wild,” said Dirk.

“Rose,” insisted her husband, and then told Dirk the real reason he had been hired.





33.


She couldn’t be left alone overnight, that was the thing. She was a somnambulist. Dirk didn’t know what that meant.

“She walks in her sleep.”

“Surely that’s not possible.”

“It is a rare condition, but a genuine one. She finds herself in a dream, you see, and in a dream she rises and moves. We must always keep the windows locked on the upstairs floors, and we bar the door to the crosswalk to the barn, lest she take it into her vacant mind to sit upon a sill or rail and try to step upon a breeze.”

Dirk said, “Are her eyes open?”

“They are open but unseeing.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means,” said the paper merchant, “while I am away, someone must stay near her, to guide her homeward if she goes out of doors.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“It has happened, so.”

“But surely to keep attentive is the job of—a husband—or a governess—or a lady’s companion of some type—”

“She won’t tolerate a governess of any sort,” said Pfeiffer, sadly. “She is afraid of losing me to some more capable woman. I know what you’re thinking: Why not some ancient biddy, some cross-eyed housewife needing a personal income? But my wife won’t have it. She admits a sense of her own—particularity. Besides, a certain amount of physical strength could be needed in a crisis.”

“Is this situation regular?”

“Annual. It gets worse at this time of year, but in the deep winter her body seems to notice the cold even if her mind doesn’t, and there is little chance she would go barefoot into the snow. So it’s in the autumn that I need help. Her remark about the moon suggests she notices the season is changed. This is also the time I go to the university at Heidelberg and to Munich to collect my orders for the spring, which work keeps me busy all winter. If you become a true apprentice, you can take over that job of travel for me someday. For now, I need you to stay here and keep—what was your word?—attentive.”