Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(26)

“Where is she going when she is walking in her sleep?”

“She cannot accept that question.” Pfeiffer sighed. “She only partly believes me when I tell her she has been sleepwalking. She can’t remember her dreams, you see, so if it is something she is dreaming, she can’t learn what it is. We must keep her out of danger.” He leaned forward. “You do not know Nastaran yet, truly, but you must love her enough to keep her out of danger.”

“I will.”





34.


Herr Pfeiffer had taken leave of his wife privately upstairs, it seemed, for when the boys gathered at his hips for final embraces, and Dirk hung back trying to appear responsible, Frau Pfeiffer didn’t emerge.

“You have your instructions,” said Herr Pfeiffer. “You won’t have any problems.”

“But if there is a problem?” asked Dirk.

“Just treat the boys as you were treated yourself, growing up.” At Dirk’s blank look, the man continued. “You’re a good boy, so your parents must have done their job right.”

I’m not good, I’m just quiet, thought Dirk, but didn’t believe it was sensible to say that aloud. “But what about Frau Pfeiffer? What if she becomes—indisposed? Or needs something I can’t help with? Has she a friend I can call upon?”

“She has no friends,” said her husband, heaving his leather carryall upon the carriage bench. “The Meersburg merchants and their wives aren’t as open to the stranger among us as I had hoped. But she is used to all that.”

“A minister she might trust?”

“She is unprofessed. The cook will be able to advise if it should come to certain womanly matters. But don’t worry. I go away every fall. All part of the pattern. See to the boys, and attend to the Frau as I have instructed you, and I shall be back before you notice I’m gone.” He headed off with a heave-ho, whistling.

The boys didn’t run off to school. Their mother wouldn’t have it. She thought Moritz too intense, and Franz was needed at home to keep him engaged.

So the boys plunged about the house and gardens. During the day Dirk kept an eye on them. Neither a hard job nor interesting to him.

During the nighttime, as agreed, Dirk assembled a pallet for himself in the corridor outside Nastaran’s bedchamber.

On the third night of Herr Pfeiffer’s absence, Dirk woke to the sound of a piece of furniture being shuffled across the floor. He knew that Herr Pfeiffer had nailed his wife’s windows shut, but for a small inset of glass. Hinged on one side, it could be opened for air. Hardly large enough for a human hand to reach through.

So the only way Nastaran Pfeiffer could leave the room was to step over Dirk.

He lay so still in the dark he might have been trying to hear the fall of a shadow. The more he held his breath, however, the more the pounding of his own blood rose in his ears like a sequence of breaking waves. Once he thought he heard the noise of beaten air, as when a bird launches herself in a small wind whipped up by her own startled, urgent wings.

He might have heard another sound—a chair pulled here or there, and then bed curtains or blankets rustling.

It’s she who has taken a lover, he thought; and somehow he has managed to come in through the window.

Herr Pfeiffer would want to know. Or he wouldn’t really want to know. Dirk couldn’t decide.

He was sure, waking again later in the night, that her door had never opened. She couldn’t have stepped over him in her sleep without his knowing. She’d have bumped into him.

In the morning she came downstairs more composed than he had seen her so far. She didn’t wear a bonnet today. Upon her brow, like a diadem, rested a stiffened, coiled gold braid. From this soft clamp fell a cloth of pale saffron with Oriental pattern. Her mouth and cheeks and chin were unveiled. As she walked, the head scarf fluttered loosely behind her shoulders. A look of billowing wings. A hawk settling.

The boys flung themselves at her and she petted them and sat while they ate their bread soaked in warm milk.

“I trust you slept well,” said Dirk, politely, seeing to the boys’ spills and crumbs.

“However could I know?” she replied. It was the most direct thing she had ever said to him. “Only a spouse can report on whether one has slept well.”

He had no answer to that. She pressed her point by saying, “Did you sleep well?”

Sure enough, he found he couldn’t quite answer with confidence. He lied, perhaps for the first time. “I think so. I may have had a dream—”

“A dream is only a fancy. But lucky you, to fancify. If it is suitable to share with my family, tell us what your dream was about.”

“I dreamed I heard furniture walking about in your room, and that you had turned into a bird, and left your room in the middle of the night, returning only as the sun was beginning to rise.”

“Did you really dream that?” She turned to him with the scrutiny of a physician. Her look was neither alarmed nor suspicious. Her expression seemed to center itself in whorls, as peering down the cup of a peony or a rose toward the golden stamen seems to stabilize the gaze and intensify the act of seeing. Her next sentence was spoken with controlled force. “Do you know where I might have been going?”

“I don’t,” he said, and then, daringly, “perhaps you do.”