Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(33)

She may have expected Dirk to answer, but he didn’t. After they’d straightened the final of the sheets—she could manage the clothing on her own, and if it was female apparel he had no business handling it—he grabbed the boys and said, “Let’s do something messy—let’s go for a walk in the rain.”

“Will we splash in puddles?” asked Franz.

“The biggest ones we can find.”

“The biggest one is the lake,” cried Moritz, delightedly.

Off they went, sliding along the sloping streets and forgoing the long steps, heading for the Seepromenade edging the choppy lake.

The boys ran ahead, holding hands. Dirk slumped his shoulders. He was clear now of the mustiness of Doktor Mesmer’s rooms, the sloppy drip of laundry in an attic, but not yet clear of the softness of Nastaran’s sole remembered upon his fingertips. What could have drawn him to touch her, and what invisibility did he suffer that she made no response? He’d been intolerably forward, even immoral, but who cared—it hadn’t been noticed.

At the end of the Seepromenade extended the jetty. The boys wanted to scamper out by themselves along the rocks and stand at the very end, but the lake water was deep there. They might slip on slick rocks, tumble, and drown. Then, he told them, he would have to fish out their corpses and go hang them up to dry in the attic with the other laundry. They howled with glee at the thought, as if he was the most droll person in the land.

He had rarely made anyone laugh. The sensation felt false.

They held hands and continued nearly to the end. No steamer in view today, no sailing or fishing vessels. Though it was still raining, the clouds were very high. Dirk looked across the agitated lake to the southeast, to the highest mountains he’d ever seen. The Swiss Alps. They raised their knobby shoulders, a wall between Meersburg and some garden in far-off Persia.





44.


Doktor Mesmer looked up as Dirk was announced. The old man had abandoned his breakfast and was fussing in an inglenook over a weird musical instrument of some sort, fitted with a lateral spindle. “My glass armonica,” he said as he hobbled away. Tones of a mechanical shrillness faded.

“You asked me to come back,” said Dirk.

“I didn’t ask,” said the Doktor. “Though, frankly, I didn’t think you’d come on your own. I thought you’d have to be collared by your good friend and dragged here.”

“Is there something more of what Nastaran said that you couldn’t bring yourself to share with her? I would like to know, even though I am not her ‘good friend.’ I’m not her husband, only her servant.”

The Doktor rearranged some limp cushions that appeared to have given up any ambition of providing comfort. He sat upon them. He crooked a finger to Dirk to draw a stool close. He wanted that his voice should not carry. Dirk obliged.

“The autumn and the winter are dark seasons for her,” said the Doktor. “Perhaps she finds it is painful when her husband has to leave. I think this ravaging of her spirit is not occasional but is systemic—chronic, as the Greeks would call it. Chronic. Having to do with time.”

“My mistress is in great distress. She talks of a key; is it a key to the garden you described? She asks me to find it for her.”

“Perhaps. But I fear you will not do so. It is a key to a garden that no longer exists. It is the garden of her childhood. And no one can return to that garden.”

“Your work—your therapy, if you will—does that not loosen the lock?”

“All I can do is lay out the map for her as best I can. She must identify the garden; she must find the key; she must turn it herself. Or she must accustom herself to living without.”

Dirk struggled to put his own words in order before speaking them. “I learned a great deal by listening to you yesterday morning. I think the reason that Nastaran is a poor mother to her sons is that she left her daughter behind when she sailed from Persia. She is distracted with grief. Surely something can be done about that.”

“The child is dead.”

“How do you know that?”

The Doktor sighed and patted his heart as if cucumbers had featured in the breakfast menu. “Don’t you see? The child in the garden is Nastaran herself. Is Frau Pfeiffer as a girl. Who ever can give an adult a key to that lost garden? The child in that garden is gone. She cannot be rescued; she cannot be found.”

Dirk slumped on his stool. “So there is no hope for Frau Pfeiffer?”

“I didn’t say that. I don’t know. I merely hope to massage the channels of memory and longing. Once reawakened, perhaps they can renew health of their own accord. We possess our own landscapes, after all. Marking them out, I have come to believe, is a physic of the mind. Or of the psyche, in the Greek sense of soul.”

“I am not a university fellow. I don’t understand.”

“Let me emblemize what I mean by turning to a separate system of metaphors. What, I ask you, does music do but bring us out of ourselves into a wordless, unauthorized zone, a country of unmarked borders? Have I mentioned I was quite social with the Mozart family of great renown? Young Wolfgang directed his Bastien und Bastienne in my very own garden. Music interprets mystery, my friend.” As the Doktor spoke, it seemed to Dirk that the echo of the glass armonica returned, faintly. Perhaps it was only the memory of the echo—and perhaps that is what Mesmer was trying to propose could be useful: the memory of an echo. Better than nothing. Better than the memory of nothing.