Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(41)

“That is a Doktor’s way of speaking,” she replied. “He means something other than what he says. Why should there be a key in a walnut? And anyway, how would I get it out? To smash a walnut with a hammer is to crush what is inside.”

“What is inside the walnut shell?” He wanted to know, but he wasn’t sure that was the question.

“The walnut? When mixed with pomegranate, is the sweet grainy sauce of a fesenjan, a stew in which spring chicken is served. With pistachios and honey the walnut is baked in pastries fit to offer a Shah, or Mullah Nasruddin himself. It is put out in small bowls on the carpet at the end of the meal. It is sweetened and fermented with hazelnuts, and my father serves it to his brothers as my mother clears away the meal.” She made an effort to control the shaking in her voice. “Your friend, Herr Doktor, he has loosened much in me. The past is a temptation.” He could see her trying to become everyday. “The past is too much to bear. Surely you have such a walnut in your own life, something that holds the key to all your past ease and safety.”

“I have had little ease and safety in my life.”

“Doesn’t even the comfort of well-known foods evoke your treasured innocence? What your mother cooked for you? For my boys it will be gingery sauerbraten. For me it is fesenjan and baklava. What is it for you, then?”

The wrong question for him. “There wasn’t enough to eat. There is nothing to call me back there. It wasn’t a garden. It was a dark, fierce woods, dangerous, and I died there.”

Then she sat on the chair she had hauled from the house. She gestured to her handiwork. “This is crude and shallow, but it’s all I know how to do. It brings nothing back to me. It mocks me and proves futility.”

In a small voice, Dirk replied: “I have said the wrong thing. Forgive me.”

“There is no right thing to say.”

She tried to control her anger. “My father was a merchant in the Persian port city of Bandar-e Bushehr. In a last attempt to improve his finances, he traveled to Europe. He told me he hoped to find other trading merchants, ones who might offer more favorable terms. Now I believe he took me abroad so I wouldn’t live to see him impoverished, perhaps murdered for failure to pay his debts. Herr Pfeiffer and I met in Amsterdam, in as accidental a way as you and I have met. For a month his attentions distracted me from nostalgia, and by the time I woke up, we were married. All I have from home besides a trunk of clothes is a dotar made of walnut wood, which I have no talent to play.”

“Did Herr Preiffer hope you would learn to play a—a dotar?”

“This is all distraction. I shall tear it down.” Her arm shot out like a scimitar and caught the nearest walnut and wrenched it, and smashed it upon the gravel walk. Being a walnut, it did not break, but lay there like a gold button off an ogre’s waistcoat.

“Stop,” said Dirk. “It may mean less to you than you want. But it means something to them.” For out of the corner of his eye he saw Franz and Moritz; they’d finished swinging and come back in the garden, and were running around the perimeter, leaping among the golden walnuts like a pair of ignorant spring lambs who cannot yet control their limbs.





52.


Dirk had never heard such a parcel of rubbish in his life as that romantic fiction perpetrated by Doktor Mesmer. But how curious. While Mesmer may have actually garnered some thoughts from Dirk—however disassociated from reality they were, goat-satyrs and oracles and meandering sacred groves!— the old charlatan must have taken an image or two and used them to plant this spurious capriccio into Dirk’s untutored mind. And now—now there was some truth to it, even if it was only the truth of a story that, once heard, becomes history. You might forget a story, but you can never unhear a story.

By that token, you might forget an event, but you can never go back to living as you did before its hidden influence was applied upon you.

Pan and the Pythia. The lost forest. What a saddlebag of crap!

Still, when Nastaran began to run a fever a few days later and took to her room, admitting only the cook with goblets of steamed lemon water and honey, Dirk distracted the fretful boys with a story.

“Tell us again about the Little Lost Forest,” they said. Dirk realized they were talking as if it were a living character in a story-book. As if it had agency, desire. “Tell us where it is now.” Dirk, with his limited sense of European geography, talked the forest up the slopes of Mount Olympus and down the other side. He made it a silent partner in some Balkan war between the Tribes of Good and Evil. The next night Dirk proposed that the homeless woods had witnessed the crowning of Charlemagne and saved the day because when the Emperor thought he was dreaming in a forest grove at midnight, it was really the Little Lost Forest hiding him from his enemies, those wicked (wicked what? Sicilians? Lombards? Saracens? Oh, the English, the wicked English!) . . . those wicked English enemies, who wanted to find him and cut off his head and steal his crown.

All the while Dirk hoped his voice was carrying, and that Nastaran would hear what a jolly helpmeet he was being, and take some sort of comfort. It seemed the only kind of comfort he could offer her, and from such a hurting distance.

He unwrapped the old knife from its leather wallet. Where had the funny thing come from, really? He had grabbed it from the hut in the forest where he had spent some early days, once upon a time, with an old man and an old woman. The old man had been a woodcutter, and this knife had been his knife, and Dirk had stolen it and bravely run away. He couldn’t remember why.