Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(34)

Dirk swallowed. “She asked me to find the key.”

“We all have our secret alphabets. Private codes of gesture and symbol. Perhaps there was an actual walnut tree in the garden of her youth. Who knows. All children want to know the hidden meaning of the world, until they grow up and resign themselves to it being unknowable. Every closed walnut that fell at her feet in that cherished past held, perhaps, more possibility than anything that has happened since. I can’t say. In any case, I prefer now to talk to you about your own vision.”

Dirk snorted. “My vision? As in a rosy past like Nastaran’s? I have no vision. I hardly have a past.”

“I want to ask you something personal. I’m curious. I’ve heard of situations like yours many times, but I’ve never met anyone before who has”—he seemed to struggle for the right words— “who has died, and then come back to life.”

“I fear you are addled this morning, Herr Doktor.”

“Sit back down. I am not done. Don’t be angry. You spoke, too, yesterday morning. You do not remember? I’m not surprised. I want to ask you now about the knife, and the bird, and the lost forest. About how you died, and what you saw, and how you came back to life. Here, I thought you might need this. The French call it eau-de-vie. I had it smuggled in. I’m partial to it of a morning, but in this case I offer it to you medicinally. Do you need to lie down? Take your time. I can wait.”

And then: “Now, tell me what you have remembered. Tell me everything.”





45.


Once, Dirk heard himself say, once there was a boy who lived in a small cabin in the deep woods with no one for company but an old woman and an old man.

He was a foundling, a child of unknown provenance, and the old woman and old man cared for the boy kindly until the day they decided to kill him. At the old woman’s command, the old man turned his woodcutter’s axe upon the boy.

“And then?” asked Mesmer.

“It’s a story, and that’s all I know,” said Dirk, in a foul dark tone.

“But the old man lived.”

“I suppose.”

“And you lived, too.”

“Oh, me?” Dirk surprised himself with his own mocking tone. “I was merely telling you a story. Me, I’m from someplace else.”

“Where?”

“It doesn’t matter. Anyway I’m not the type to husband my memories. Are you thinking I am wounded as Nastaran, with her ferocious past of locked walnuts? I’m more like a spider—or a burdock—I cling with strings and hooks only to every passing day. I haul little or nothing along with me.”

The old doctor said, “The Latin word for luggage is impedimenta. But we all carry things, whether we know it or not. I think you carry your own death, uncompleted. Or revoked temporarily. I think—please don’t flinch like that, it makes me feel I haven’t adequately tended to my morning ablutions—I think you’re one of those very few people who have ever died and come back to life.”

“I see the eau-de-vie has much to recommend it.”

“You cut. You wound. Sarcasm is to be expected in the young and stupid. Patience, please. And listen to me. Human literature has always spoken of certain—passages. Transitions. Transports. Homer tells of Odysseus going into Hades to interview Achilles; and without intention to blaspheme, may I remind you that the Christ descended into Hell? Dante saw the fiery pit in his great poem. But those are legends and lore; they are faith and fictions. Not everyone is a character in a story, Herr—what did you say your last name was?”

“Drosselmeier.”

“I have a wide circle of medical associates. True, some no longer answer my petitions for a loan . . . that’s a different matter. In the interest of truth we must be willing to be called a Dr. Slop, a charlatan, a ‘verray parfit praktisour,’ as Chaucer has styled the Physic in his tales. I don’t care what they say of me. Mozart was beastly. What was I talking about?”

Dirk suspected the Doktor cared deeply about what was said about him. The old man regained his thought and rushed on. “What is missing from the imaginative histories of the ancients, and likewise from the venerable faiths? Tell me.”

“I don’t know. Perhaps: reason?”

“Wrong. What’s missing from the literature of our species are the stories of the peasants. The filthy illiterate. Those with no firm address, no surname. No one to impress, nothing to lose. But the poor tell stories, too. Ordinarily, only women wise with herbs, or father confessors, or we doctors—only we ever hear those stories. And what we hear! There is such a thing, it seems, as dying and visiting the other land, and coming back to life.

“When I helped Nastaran to liberate the seized channels of memory, you were here, too. When she fell silent, you spoke. You told me that you had been murdered, and you went to another place, and something happened there. And then you came back. But you were not the same.”

“Did I also tell you where I hid that crock of golden shit I meant to go back and reclaim? Please remind me.”

“You are trying to shame me. I’m too brazen to be shamed, and I’m too old to bother with you if you won’t cooperate. There was a tree you cut down, you killed. It was a sacred tree in a severed forest, and in dying, you yourself went to the lost forest.”