Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(48)

As Dirk wasn’t eager to leave Nastaran alone for a single evening if he could help it, he bade the young Pfeiffer boys a brisk good-bye. They were too busy romping about with their uncle to reply. Tantchen Isabelle refreshed the food parcel with slices of ham and a few apples and brown bread with seeds. Then Felix and Dirk set off on foot. The sound of the boys’ laughter haunted the farmland behind them until the road turned at the heel of the hill.

They strode with vigor. After the first half hour had passed in companionable silence, their pace slackened. Dirk asked Felix more about his interest in music and how he had come to settle on the violoncello as an instrument. Felix liked to talk about himself, so Dirk heard more about the university student than he’d ever heard about anyone before. There was the uncle in London, and a surviving grandfather somewhere on the Hanseatic coast. Felix’s parents lived alone in a village northwest of Munich. Their humble home looked out on the Dachauer Moos, a marshy sort of badlands that gave off a redolent stink. Felix abhorred it. Profoundly dispiriting. His parents had had no other children and seemed perpetually surprised to have given rise to Felix, as if they’d expected only to serve the Lord and not to serve supper. Vater Stahlbaum was a verger at the church of Saint Jakob in Dachau, which had a door handle shaped like a fish. He whipped young Felix once for liking the feeling of the fish in his clasped hand so much that he stood outside stroking it over and over instead of entering to receive the Sacrament. “So many ways to come to the holy truth,” finished Felix. “Now, your turn.”

Dirk thought, I must be capable of saying something; I must be capable of knowing something about the world now I’ve lived in it a bit longer. Surely friendship is built on the sharing of private histories. One has to start somewhere.

“I was born, I don’t know where. Or of whom. I was a foundling in a basket, and raised in a forest by an old man and an old woman until, I forget why, I ran away.”

“Were their names Pan and Pythia? They sound like the same pair of people. Old and cross and full of mystery.”

“Isn’t that anyone’s parents?”

Felix snorted with surprise, as if Dirk had just given an amusing disquisition in classical Greek. It was only relief, Dirk guessed—relief that Dirk was capable of an actual opinion.

But pry and prod as Felix did, Dirk couldn’t reveal much more about his origins. The old man and the old women were self-sufficient. Indeed they might have suffered some sort of fear of society, as they lived like hermits and never went to town together, and avoided all manner of travelers in the woods as best they could. “The only time I really remember someone at the waldhütte,” admitted Dirk, “was the day before I left. A man was wandering along looking for someone to share the common stories of the district, and he found the old woman and listened carefully to stories she told. She was good at storytelling, I will grant her that much.”

“Like those philologists, the brothers from Steinau, who produced the Household Tales. Die Gebrüder Grimm. I wonder if it was someone following in their footsteps. Or if it might have been one of the brothers himself? You should ask your Mutter.”

“I don’t know where the old people are. Or if they are alive, even. They were old when I was young.”

“So were my parents, and they’re still alive. Sort of. We should find your old folks. We could go on a hunt. Where do they live?”

“They are as lost as the Little Lost Forest,” insisted Dirk, and would say no more about them. Luckily, Felix’s crimson cape started to whip about his shoulders, flapping and snapping too noisily to talk above. The subject was abandoned as the travelers turned their faces into a strengthening and sharply chillier wind.

Within another half an hour they began to think perhaps Tantchen Isabelle had been right to suggest they postpone their departure for Meersburg. A rainy slick began to fall. “We’ll not make Meersburg, and I’ll miss my concert,” said Felix. “At the rate this is falling, if it turns to snow before we regain the main road, we’ll lose the track, too.”

When that happened, they knocked on the door of a farmhouse in whose windows a few cozy lights shone. No one answered the knock, and Dirk wanted to turn away, but Felix said, “We’ll perish in a snowy chasm, clutching each other for warmth until we die, and what good to Nastaran will you be then?” There was sense to his argument, but Dirk let Felix be the one to try the handle of the door, which opened to him easily enough.

“Hello; we are harmless strangers in this sudden storm,” called Felix, for the house had the aroma of occupancy. Food in the kitchen before them, laid out and half-eaten; a fire in the kitchen stove, and an iron kettle of water on the boil. A cat playing with a half-dead mouse looked up at them with scorn, and the mouse escaped for a few more moments of life until the cat could return to its game. “Hail, are you at home?” called Felix again.

A step on the stairs, and a beefy farmer with bloodied hands stumbled into the room. “Has the midwife sent you two bekloppts in her place? Where is she?”

“I don’t know, we’re not her lads,” said Felix. “If she is on the road, she’s imperiled by this sudden snow squall. We’ve come to ask for your roof over our heads until morning.”

“Do you know about midwifery?”

Felix shook his head in mock horror. Dirk said, “I saw a cat give birth to kittens once. That’s all I know.”