Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(52)

“Won’t it break?”

“I’m using this awl I found in the barn last night to gouge out what I can, so the jaw and its handle are detached from the rest of the fellow. Two pieces of interlocking wood carved from the same block. It’s a tricky business but the wood is strong, and the knife is talented.”

“Your hands are not instruments?”

Dirk looked up. “Only midwives, I think.” And he smiled. “If one of the pins snap, I could replace it with a nail and it would still move like a hinge. But the jaw will be stronger if I can keep the pieces separate and interlocking.”

“Your lady love will adore it.” Felix’s voice was uncharacteristically small. “She will hold it in her lap.” He put his finger in the pot of honey and smeared the lower lip of the carven figure. Then he pulled the twist of wool from his pocket and pressed it until it adhered. “There. The beard will hide the lack of a heart.”

“Is it a flaw to be heartless?” asked Dirk, pointedly.

A small brown bird came down in the silence and stood on a gatepost at the edge of the terrace. “Hey, where are your mates?” asked Dirk of the bird. “Aren’t you off to Africa or the Levant with them?”

“She’ll never give you what you want, you know.” Felix seemed in quiet, business-like despair. “Will it be enough, to have made her a present? Will that see you through?”

“See me through what, Felix? I’ve never been able to imagine three days ahead of myself my whole life. I don’t know any more of life than that infant in the basket does. I’m just doing what I can from day to day. Handholds and landfalls and anything to grasp onto. Nothing gives much purchase, does it?”

Felix shrugged. His red cape seemed larger today, and he was lost a little inside it.

The thrush, if that is what she was, hopped from the post to the edge of the table, and brashly worked at devouring a scatter of crumbs. Her movements were a kind of dance, hop skip hop triple skip. She looked at Dirk, as if trying to see if he was a bread crumb, and then she departed in a flurry of wing-feathers. One fell behind on the stone terrace.

“Here,” said Felix, picking it up. “Here is your plume for Herr Nutcracker.”

Using the awl, Dirk routed a pinhole notch, and threaded the feather into it. Now the nutcracker belonged to them both, somehow. Dirk finished the corner of the jaw, and began working the tip of the knife into the back of the throat. “This is the last integument, and then the jaw will have life,” he said. His palm was closed around the black-iron imp, but the knife-head seemed warm to his grasp. “In . . . just this . . . this final bit . . . and, is it presto?”

“Presto!” said Felix. He reached over and gripped the handle of the nutcracker and lifted it up, before Dirk, using the tip of the knife, could finish clearing out the last of the shavings from the nutcracker’s throat. The mouth swung open on its solid jaw pins. “I sing of the Golden Walnut!” cried Felix in a pretense of triumph. Several other travelers on the terrace turned and looked. Then Felix slapped the handle back into place, and the bulbous lower lip of the wooden nutcracker smacked against his upper lip with a satisfied grin. “It works!” cried Felix as the blade of the knife fell out of the nutcracker’s mouth, broken off of the cold lifeless dwarf-shaped handle that had held it for so long.





63.


They parted at Kirchstra?e in the center of town. Felix would continue on to the gasthof and the von Koenigs, and make his apologies for having missed the concert last night. And then, he said, he would wander back to university, probably, and rejoin his fellow scholars.

“That’s a big change from yesterday,” said Dirk, trying to sound interested but eager to hurry home.

“As you said earlier, who knows what is to happen three days out?” said Felix. “Maybe I’ll suddenly come upon enough of life to be able to play the ’cello with conviction.”

“Conviction? Is that all it takes?”

“You mock me. You’ve learned to mock.” A wry grin worked its way forward between Felix’s clamped lips. “Hope for you yet, I suppose.”

“You’ll be playing for the crowned heads of Austria and France by the time you’re twenty-five,” said Dirk.

“I’ll be married to Hannelore or Engelbertine or some such goddess,” said Felix, sullenly, “and we’ll have eight of those little pinched newborns like the one we saw this morning. And the screams to make them come out right! . . . Dirk, give me something to remember you by. Please.”

Dirk had driven his hands into his pockets, feeling for something, so could not resist when Felix gripped him by the shoulders and kissed him so fast and hard his teeth rattled in their sockets. He pulled away. “Here,” Dirk said, opening his hand. Felix caught it. The broken knife-handle, the dead carved little figure, staring up at nothing. “Take it, Pan, it is a thing of the past.”

They parted, moved to opposite sides of the street without further comment, as the last of the melting snow ran cold and clear in the gutters, and a cart filled with squawking chickens in cages came up the street between them.

Dirk then turned toward home.

It was, as he probably ought to have guessed, too late, far too late. In the absence of family and a chaperone with any sort of authority, Nastaran had tried to release her childhood from herself through her own steps, taken in the middle of the night to the edge of the jetty that faced the barrier Alps. To the edge of the lake, and past the edge. Whether this was an accident during somnambulism or clear-eyed suicide, no one could ever say.