Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(27)

At this she rose from the table and floated away. As she lifted her hems to clear the step to the passageway, he saw she was not wearing customary leather shoes, but dancing slippers in muskmelon silk.





35.


Having received no instruction in the particulars of the necessary entertainments, Dirk was aware he was failing the boys a little. They were becoming more rambunctious. Pottery shattered; language coarsened. It was a relief to hear from the laundry assistant that the harvest festival was about to begin. Dirk wondered about taking Franz and Moritz.

Franz said loftily, “Papi tells us that our festival is nothing as royal as the celebrations held in Munich for the marriage of Crown Prince Ludwig to Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen. That was the first Oktoberfest. Papi went and got drunk for only the second time in his life.”

“When was the first time?”

“He won’t say.”

Moritz mumbled, “The day he met Mutti.”

Franz sat up like a trained poodle. “Can we go to the fair?”

“Let me ask.”

Nastaran was in the kitchen. She was arguing with the cook. She wanted, it seemed, a pomegranate, or a few of them. “The harvest market isn’t till tomorrow, and in any case pomegranates aren’t native to our land,” said the cook angrily. It sounded as if this was a conversation they’d had many times before.

“Pomegranates,” insisted Nastaran, “and walnuts. I have a holy hunger. I need them.”

“What you need,” muttered the cook under her breath, “is something I can’t easily supply. Oh, the mercy of good fortune, look who’s here,” she said to Dirk. “Lend me those lads as a hedge against unreason from Good Dame Precious Particular here. Boys, I shall set you to carving potatoes, how is that?” Distracted for a moment, the boys fell to, and Dirk turned for a few private moments with their mother, but she had already slipped away, bangles clinking and scarves rustling in the windless volume of the staircase.

“I want to talk to you about Oktoberfest,” he called. Upstairs, a door closed.

“Dirk! I need your knife with the creepy dwarf so I can carve a monster out of a potato,” cried Moritz.

“This potato has more eyes than Dirk does,” muttered Franz.





36.


She was always disappearing. That was her charm and her allure, and it maddened him. Through the hasped gate into the dried and brittle garden; through the low door to the stone yard where the horses would be watered, had there been horses; behind films of cloth. He didn’t think she was being intentionally seductive. Then, he didn’t know much about intention. Or seduction.





37.


That night as he was settling his body down upon the pallet, he thought he heard the sounds for which the boys had waited all day. Heavy wheels over cobbles, curses and snatches of song and high laughter.

Dirk lay back upon the coat he’d folded up as a pillow. With his eye closed, he followed a parade pictured in his mind. A lady in green, not so much saintly as serious, attended by a swarm of birds burnished with torchlight. A congregation of pastors in formation, apparently right at home among this midnight revelry. A goat-legged impresario of sorts. A truculent bear on a chain, sometimes on four paws, sometimes upright. Prisoners in chains, singing. What a motley population the world could pretend to tolerate.

He was looking for Nastaran, for she must be there; she would be coming along any moment.

He was shaken from his vigil. He thought she had come to him at midnight, at last. But it was Franz.

“Moritz,” he said. Franz was keeping his voice low so as not to affright his mother. He was crying. “Moritz has heard the caravan in the streets, and I think he has left to run after it, to watch.”

Dirk was up at once. Taking the older brother by the hand, he slipped out the back door of the house. He left the door on the latch so they could return without waking Nastaran.

“Why didn’t you come to me sooner?” he snapped at the boy.

“I thought I was dreaming,” sobbed Franz. Dirk could hardly fault him for that.

Fortunately the progress of the caravan was easy to follow. The noise hadn’t abated. Indeed, Dirk and Franz weren’t the only midnight pedestrians. More than one curious citizen of Meersburg had come to darkened windows in nightshirt and cap, or donned a greatcoat and shambled out to watch the procession.

Dirk didn’t know why anyone but a child would get up in the middle of the night and tiptoe along the cobbles in the moonlight.

We sleep with exhaustion, thought Dirk. We do this every night, don’t we. And we wake with such exhaustion.

In guttering torchlight among the beery farmers who were beginning to angle their wagons in favored positions around the platz, Dirk caught sight of Moritz. He looked abandoned and cold. Franz reached him first, and it seemed to Dirk that initially Moritz hardly recognized his brother. But the moment passed, and Moritz became alert, and seemed only a little cross to be found. “Ach, I’m in for a thrashing,” he said, slipping his hand into Dirk’s. “I’m sorry.”

“Why did you come outside?” asked Dirk, equably.

The boy shrugged. “We waited till evening. I couldn’t wait till morning, too.”

What doesn’t arrive by day has to arrive by night, if it is to arrive at all, thought Dirk. “There’s not much to see.” Already the singers had quieted, the rumble of carts was done, and the whole party was laying out bedrolls under their wagons. Otherness subsided. Dirk felt as if the company dragon must have been led to the church graveyard, and the angels ascended to roost invisibly on the leads of the vestry. Ghosts in their disguise of moonlight, basilisks in the blue stone shadows.