Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(32)

“You left a child there, among the roses and the fountains, among shrieking peacocks and other luminous birds. You walk at night to try to return to collect the child. To rescue her. You did not mean to leave her behind when you left with—was it I think—merchants from the Low Countries, from Holland? Amsterdam? Because of a family matter? . . . and there you met your current husband.”

His voice was neutral, without scorn or blame.

“You could see the Persian Gulf, you could smell salt in the air. There was a tiled dome on some ecclesiastical building, a mosque or a shrine, that rose to the east, like the blue-veined breast of a sleeping mother. You could see it above the top of the stone wall. There was a pomegranate tree, there was a walnut tree. Someone used to tell you that the key to your life would be found in a walnut. You would collect the walnuts as they fell, but you hadn’t the strength to open them by hand, and there was no brick or mallet or stone with which to strike them. I don’t know who used to tell you that. I don’t know much more, nor if I have said this very accurately at all. I am somewhat out of practice.”

Nastaran was weeping, and her forehead nearly touched her skirted knees. Perhaps as much to afford her some privacy as anything else, Doktor Mesmer turned to Dirk and said to him, “Please take her home when she is ready. Then come back to me at once. I have something to tell you, and another thing to ask you.”





42.


She wouldn’t let Dirk go back to Herr Doktor, not right away. She spent the day in a parlor whose circlets of crown glass in leaded frames looked out at the mountains of eastern Switzerland across the lake. At evening she called Dirk to the open doorway but held him there, not speaking further.

“What is it I can do for you?” he finally asked, willing to hear any answer, any one, if it would stir her out of her spell.

“What is the key of which the Doktor spoke?” she finally replied. “The key in the walnut shell?”

“It is your key.” He spoke with deliberate imprecision. Cautiously. He had no idea what he meant, except that if the idea of a key had come from her, the secret of the key must be hers, too. Hidden in her memory; in her heart.

“Someone must find it for me. I cannot find it for myself.”

Someone? Someone? Why not Dirk, you must find it for me? He suffered a flash of irritation. He crossed the threshold of the parlor and walked to the straight-backed chair against the wall, where she sat enthroned, her hands wreathed in the lattice of its arms. She looked up at him and bit her lower lip. He knelt like a Siegfried or a Roland and bowed his head. Her feet were bare. He lifted one foot to his lips.

He left her in silence, in the near dark. She seemed not to notice.

He lay down outside her door once more, but if he slept, it was only behind his eye-patch.





43.


He hadn’t realized it was laundry day until the girl accosted him in the stairwell.

“She’s not coming to help me hang the bedding?” she asked, raising an eyebrow to the closed door of Frau Pfeiffer. “I can’t manage on my own, and the cook is in a snit over a maggoty cut of beef.”

“It’s started to rain,” he said. “How can you hang sheets to dry in the rain?”

“You come upstairs and help, and I’ll show you.”

The boys, who had been playing in the garden until the downpour, came thundering inside. They joined Dirk and the girl in traipsing to the very top of the barn.

The young laundress swung open high wooden doors in the back wall. The view looked over the alley and roofs, north toward Munich out there somewhere. A protruding beam and a pulley for hoisting bales proved the point: This had been a hayloft once. Despite the rain, a strong breeze pulled through on a flood of grainy-green light.

The tent-like space under sloping eaves was strung with cords for dripping clothes and sheeting during days like this, and probably in the winter, too.

The clotheslines on the side nearer the open doors displayed billowing, painted sheets. As Dirk helped the girl square off and drape the dripping laundry over the ropes, his eye sought out the work of Nastaran Pfeiffer.

The sheets were painted in two styles, quite unalike.

Some were done in black line, in the style of woodcuts by late medieval cartographers or court geographers. Nastaran must have had models to work from. Several, maybe all of them, were of Meersburg as viewed from the water, the way Dirk had first seen it approaching on the steamer. The lower town; the great broad flats of cliff-edge administrative buildings. The archaic angles of the tower of the old castle. The filled-in scallops of roofline, the hills beyond. Sculpted meadows and vineyards. Tight parallel lines to indicate shadow, dimension, progression toward a dim horizon. As an engraver on steel might do.

They might have been copied from a voyager’s collection: “Towns of the Bodensee.” They had a clinical exactitude.

The other paintings featured vague and flaming colors. As Dirk stared, the shapes organized themselves into coherence. Sequences of disorienting landscape. Flowering trees and sculpted hills progressed in a flat, unnatural evenness from the bottom hem to the top. No sky showed, no horizon, and each sequence of trees apparently ranging behind the foremost was articulated with the same degree of precision. Nothing became dim or smoky by distance.

The boys raced among them until the laundress spoke sharply to them. “It’ll be on my slate if these scribbles and daubs fall and dirty,” she said pointedly, though it was clear she thought it was Dirk’s job to mollify the children. “Go on, help me with this last load and then get those heathens out of here. Why should housework always feel like a military campaign, I wonder?”