Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(42)

It made a nice story, or the beginning of a story. Dirk didn’t know how it went on, though, so he didn’t bother to tell that one to the boys. He used the knife to carve them a few rough figures of soldiers. It seemed the blade wasn’t dulling with time, but growing keener. A trick of its metallic makeup.





53.


Another letter from Pfeiffer. He was delayed still. His ailment had grown into a pulmonary spasm. He could not sit up without a punishing cough. He couldn’t yet leave his bed.

Nastaran folded the letter into her lap. They were sitting in the orchard garden. “Who else, I wonder, cannot manage to leave his bed,” she murmured in a costive voice. It was the bitterest and also the healthiest Dirk had ever heard her. He set the boys to playing with the few little wooden soldiers coming home from the Napoleonic wars. Dirk had carved them poorly; they were little more than pegs with identifying noses. Still, the boys personalized them with crude and consistent behaviors, different for each. Dirk made up a story about a river they must forge here, see, on this broken branch, across this scarf that will be a stream, all right?—no one must fall in or the others will have to save him! Then Dirk retired to a bench in the frosty sunlight.

“All this is making a menace for you, but it needn’t be,” said Dirk. “Nastaran”—he had not before dared to use her name without an honorific—“no one adores a wife more than Herr Pfeiffer does you. Otherwise he wouldn’t have taken such pains to bring me into your household, so I might be an assist to you.”

“I am a sore trial to him, with my airs and vapors and, and, the offenses I take. I would leave me were I him. I would leave myself if I could.”

“Did your experience with the Herr Doktor afford you any relief?”

She grunted. “We are all migrants. We are exiled from the place where meaning meant something.”

He waited, picking at calluses near his fingernails.

“Look.” By way of explanation, she rotated a hand at her boys. Across the garden they were squatting beside the plugs of wood, moving them this way and then, while conducting muttered negotiations of the utmost seriousness. “Do you realize that they live someplace that we don’t?”

He felt he almost apprehended what she meant . . .

“Those boys and us—we only seem to be sharing a life here. The young are entirely separate. They are someplace else right now. They won’t join us in our lives, really, until they are grown. And by then, who will they become? People I don’t know. And I may not even be here when they get here.”

“Where will you be?”

She didn’t answer, but it was a normal silence this time, not a troubled one. Perhaps Herr Doktor Mesmer’s peculiar methods had massaged some paralyzed process within her back into operation. Dirk reached out and covered the hand in her lap with his. She didn’t twitch, neither did she add her other hand to clasp his.

“Those who sit in the house of grief will someday sit in the garden,” she said.

“This garden?”

“I was reciting a ghazal from the Divan of Hafez. ‘The bruised soul will find honey.’” Then she added a few more lines in Persian.

“We have that much in common, you know,” he said. “We’re both exiled from something long ago.”

“Maybe you did die once,” she said. “When it is my turn, I will not come back the way you did.”

The boys shrieked. A soldier had fallen into the raging torrent, and one by one the others jumped in, too. Whether to rescue their drowning colleague or to relish the solidarity of a community suicide, Dirk couldn’t tell.

He couldn’t carve a magic key into Nastaran’s secret garden. He couldn’t open any golden walnut that might harbor such a key. But perhaps Dirk could make a figure that could open some ordinary walnut. It was the possibility of hope that mattered, he knew.

He took his hand from her lap and put it in his pocket. He felt the knife with the carved figure squatting on the blunt knoll of its handle. He imagined that it could speak, but the language it talked in—some obscure tongue, a lingua hellenica, or maybe a lingua magicis—how could he know that argot?





54.


Then Nastaran took him to the small office with the dusty drapes and Pfeiffer’s bookkeeping ledgers. She opened a locked drawer and withdrew from a sack of pounded grey leather a healthy fistful of coins. She sorted out a few gulden and a scraping of florins. She wrapped them in a cloth and handed the parcel to Dirk. He wondered if he was being asked to find other employment.

“You need to take the boys to visit their uncle in Oberteuringen,” she told him.

“I haven’t heard about that from Herr Pfeiffer,” he replied.

“At this time of year, their father usually does it, but”—she looked about with a studied theatricality he hadn’t seen before in her, as if to suggest she was just noticing—“he isn’t here.” She shrugged. “If we wait till he bothers to recover and then to return, the snow may come and the chance disappear. Their uncle is expecting his nephews, and I have written to say you will arrive with them within the week.”

Dirk hadn’t been made head of household in absentia. He had no authority to protest. Nonetheless, he raised what few objections he could come up with.

“Herr Pfeiffer wanted me to stay and keep watch on—” But he wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence respectfully.