Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(30)

Felix uncorked the flask and poured a portion in a gummy glass with a chipped gold rim. There was only one glass. Doktor Mesmer fortified himself. “I have been discredited in Vienna and I have been discredited in Paris,” he declared. “Lavoisier was cutting, the bastard, but at least that visiting gasbag, Herr Benjamin Franklin, managed to be witty in his dismissal of my claims. I am parading my high-fledged associations for your admiration, in case you haven’t noticed. How tawdry of me. Am I obliged to humiliate myself further at this stage in my life?”

“We won’t keep you long. But you might help. I should be so grateful.” Felix said that last in a way that suggested the mildest sort of menace, a pressure brought to bear upon a man who couldn’t stand up from a chair without the help of a cane. Felix went on. “Where shall I start? Your work concerns a theory of affinity between animals as they meet and correspond with one another, is that aptly put? A sympathetic hydraulics of vapors and fluids, a depression of phlegms? A rising of invisible energies? I practiced these definitions last night to get them right.”

“I see you like that part. The young always like that part,” said Doktor Mesmer. “Sometimes my theory is known as animal magnetism. Have you a canary, perhaps, with a chronic malaise? Won’t sing? Much can be achieved by understanding the psyche of the canary. Listen to your canary. Did you know psyche is the ancient Greek word for soul? Of course you did.” He was mocking them, mocking himself.

“Tell us about the part that’s come to be known as Mesmerism,” prompted Felix.

“Ailments.” The Doktor appeared to be addressing the schnapps. “Physical abnormalities. What are they? A blocking in the circulation of vital liquors? Perhaps. If so, an induced crise—a trance state—can sometimes be helpful at restoring vigor. This aids in recuperation and for a while it also allowed me to keep up with my debts. But, Herr Stahlbaum, I’m not about to treat your young friend.” He glared over Felix’s shoulder at Dirk. “I can see from here that he is beyond help. Those born dull remain dull. I shall not be sued for incompetence. I won’t open myself to that indignity.”

“I told you, it isn’t him,” said Felix. “And if we don’t pay you for your services, we can hardly sue you if you fail to satisfy. Isn’t that true?”

The elderly gentleman—charlatan or seer, Dirk had no way of knowing—sighed. His hands trembled, one on the stem of the glass, one on the letter in his lap. He said, as much to himself as to the young men in the room, “When Herr Benjamin Franklin came in, and I saw his prodigious intelligence and his beaver-skin cap, I wondered if I was having an elective affinity with genius or with a dead beaver. Can you trust anything that I would say?”

“You’re lying about that little vignette.” Felix settled his own felt cap upon his head. “I have affinities of my own. Might you see the person in question tomorrow morning at this hour? A respectable hausfrau?”

“I suppose unless I gouge my own eyes out with a cooking implement, I shall have no choice,” said Doktor Mesmer. “I shall study up my old methods. You’re leaving the flask as tribute, I suppose.” He poured himself a second portion.

Dirk hurtled down the stairs, eager to get away. Outside the front door, Felix bounded after him, chortling. Felix pressed his palms upon Dirk’s shoulders and launched himself in the air, like a boy leaping over a stile, and hooted. “So I have powers of persuasion of my own,” he crowed. “Now you do your job, and persuade your Frau Pfeiffer to meet us here tomorrow.”





40.


As it happened, while Dirk was out with Felix that morning, a letter had arrived from Herr Pfeiffer. He’d taken ill with a bowel complaint and was laid up, unable to begin the arduous return carriage journey until his vitals settled themselves. Nastaran was to forgive him and Dirk Drosselmeier was to continue to maintain the household as directed.

Frau Pfeiffer was convinced that her husband, finding his wife unmoored and deficient, had fallen in bed with an ostler’s daughter or a courtly dame. Under the circumstances, Nastaran lost her usual resolve and reticence and she succumbed to Dirk’s pleading. She presented herself at the appointed hour dressed like a proper wife, her wild hair swept upon her head and hidden under a tedious and sturdy bonnet. No circlet of brass, no veil of painted silk. The shoes were brown leather, stout as varnished aubergines. Her mouth and chin were bravely unveiled in the local manner.

“We want to come, too,” said Moritz. Franz hung back in the passage to the kitchen, eyeing the gingerbread that the cook was rolling out.

“Stay here. Make me a gingerbread figure,” said Nastaran.

“A man or a lady?” asked Moritz.

“You choose.”

“I shall make a gingerbread nutcracker,” said Moritz.

“Some gingerbread walnuts and pomegranates, too,” said Nastaran. She wouldn’t take Dirk’s hand to manage the stairs or to climb into the carriage, and she told him to ride up top with the coachman.

“It isn’t far, we could easily walk,” said Dirk, a little hurt.

“I don’t walk in Meersburg,” she replied, as if she believed the walled city to be swarming with wild cats and wolves.



Somewhat to Dirk’s surprise, when they arrived at the apartments of Doktor Mesmer, Nastaran refused to see the scholar without Dirk as a chaperone. “My husband wouldn’t hear of it,” she told Mesmer, though he looked too old to threaten a strudel. Felix, arriving late, was heard bashing about in the antechamber as Mesmer settled Frau Pfeiffer upon a leather-covered settee. Dirk took a wooden stool in a corner.