Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(45)

“You will take care of yourself,” said Dirk to Nastaran, coming a little nearer, lowering his voice for privacy.

“That is what you must expect of me,” she replied, turning her face upon him at last. What he’d come to recognize as kohl was smeared about her eyes, lids and lashes alike. The ornamentation made her eyes bigger but seemed much farther away. “You take care of them. That’s all you can do.”

It was a dismissal and a challenge at once. He lifted his hand to her as she hurriedly fastened the black shawl around hereslf more tightly.

He unfurled his hand and gave her what he had for her. It wasn’t much.

“It won’t have a golden key in it,” he said, “but when you open it, it will smell like Persia.”

She rolled the common walnut in her hand. “I have no way to open the past,” she said.

“The smell will bring you back,” he told her. “I will open it for you when I come back. I promise. Keep it safe till I return.”

The horses nickered and paced, Felix made a trumpet voluntary with his lips meant to sound like melodic farting. The boys screamed with joy. The last warm breeze Dirk would feel in some time coiled in from the lane, smelling of baking bread and simmering pork and apples. Nastaran dropped the walnut in the neck of her blouse, between her breasts, it seemed. Dirk could barely get to the carriage on his swoony legs—he had to lean on that old staff he was still hauling about. He had thought it might come in handy while hiking along a high road; here it was being useful already.

Felix hollered an instruction. Smitten by his antics, the boys didn’t turn to wave good-bye to their mother.





57.


But at the edge of Meersburg, when the landscape began to open out into stubbled fields of hops and pastures for oxen, Felix rolled his hand in the air, bidding the driver to continue. Dirk said, “Between us we don’t have coin enough to hire a trap all the way to Oberteuringen.”

“I received my seasonal allowance. Settle down your nerves,” replied Felix, patting Dirk on the knee and pulling the blanket up around their waists. “I know you by now, Dirk. You won’t want to spend a night on the road worrying about her well-being while you’re gone. We’ll make of this trip as quick an operation as we can. Perhaps even get there and back in one day if we’re lucky.”

The boys had tired of kneeling up and looking through the muscovite window at the road reversing itself behind them, or leaning out to spit at sentinel dogs. “Tell us more about the Little Lost Forest, Dirk,” said Franz. Moritz put his thumb in his mouth and nodded.

Easier to do that than talk to Felix, who always seemed to Dirk to contain several identities simultaneously, to go by the evidence of the contradictory emotions displayed by his smile, his eyes, his hands. Felix’s intelligence was one thing, his rapscallion nature another, and his unsolicited affection a third. Too much for Dirk. He leaned forward to clasp both boys’ hands as they slumped in the seat opposite. Felix relaxed with one arm behind his head to pillow it. A smile cousin to a smirk played along his upper lip.

“I forget what I said before,” said Dirk, looking for a prompt. What sat with them, what made a difference? He himself had never been a child, he now realized; what did he know about what children wanted to hear?

“The Little Lost Forest was lost,” said Franz.

“In the forest,” said Moritz.

“Walking from someplace, Rome or Greece, I forget, one of those places . . .”

“. . . ultramontane?” supplied Felix.

“Shhh,” said Dirk, delivering a backhanded slap on Felix’s upraised knee without turning around. “The forest was—it was severed, it was orphaned. It was a place without a home. Does that make sense?”

Moritz shook his head. Franz nodded. Felix lit a pipe, pretentiously.

“It was . . . migrating. It was wandering slowly north through Europe. And in the forest were two spirits, who came from ancient times and who were carried away—”

“Like us,” said Moritz, indicating the carriage.

“Except they weren’t youngsters. And they weren’t happy.”

“We’re not happy,” said Franz cheerily enough. “Something has to happen now in the story. It’s stuck.”

“I forget who the spirits were,” said Moritz.

“Me, too,” said Felix, elbowing Dirk in the ribs.

“We have to have names for them,” said Dirk, buying himself a little time. “One is a kind of satyr of sorts—”

“—I’ll just bet he was,” muttered Felix.

“Will you let me be? He is an old acquaintance of highland shepherds. He likes to run along meadows and scare the goats into a rush. Like an invisible wolf on the margins. But he’s not intent on hunting them, just having fun. His name is Pan.”

“Are the goats lost, too?” asked Moritz.

“No, they’re still keeping the grass shorn around the ancient temples. They’re well behaved now that Pan has stopped panicking them.”

“No fun for the goats,” said Moritz.

“He likes to make trouble, that’s true,” said Dirk.

“Who’s the other one?” asked Franz. “Is it a boy?”

“No. She’s a beautiful young woman, maybe the ghost of a tree that someone cut down.”