Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(53)

Part Two





Intermezzo





64.


He stayed in Meersburg another eight years, until the boys were more or less grown. Well, Franz, anyway. Perhaps Moritz would never emerge into anything like competence.

Gerwig Pfeiffer didn’t join the others at the quay to see Dirk off. Whether this was because in his stolid silences Herr Pfeiffer still held Dirk accountable for Nastaran’s death, Dirk didn’t know. Or perhaps the old man just wasn’t interested. The boys came down in the cart with Frau Pfeiffer the Next. She was a hearty proxy of a wife, not so much a pillar of the community as a footstool.

“Well, that’s that, then,” said the second Frau Pfeiffer. Her Christian name was Cordula. She handed Dirk’s lunch to him, and then assumed her customary stance, her wrists wrapped around her forearms and her elbows angled away from her waist. This, Dirk always assumed, was to air the skin on her upper arms, which tended to a farmwife gloss in the summer. “We’ll miss you, Herr Dirk. You shall always have a home with us.”

She was everything Nastaran was not, and nothing like how Nastaran had been, except in one way: Cordula kept a lot inside. The slant gleam in her eye was a sign of intelligence and probity.

Franz was now through school. (The first thing the stepmother did was throw the boys into a rowdy schoolroom with an anarchic teacher who taught them Greek and archery and sums and Psalms. Franz had thrived, Moritz become shriveled.) The older boy was ready to apprentice with his father in the paper trade. Not knowing how to perform a gesture of authority, Franz clasped Dirk’s forearms with both his hands, and then pushed a purse of cash upon him, all sudden, as a bully might land a thump. Dirk allowed only a grunt of thanks, so as not to further discomfit the boy in this shift of authority between them.

He turned to Moritz, who was kicking the rim of the cartwheel and looking down along the lake into hazy glare. The Persian force in the younger brother was emerging in his plum-like, deep-set eyes. “I don’t know why you have to go now,” said Moritz. His tone suggested a correlative assumption . . . since you didn’t have the nerve to leave eight years ago when you deserted your post and cost us our mother.

“You’re grown,” said Dirk. “Or nearly. The paper trade is your family work, not mine.”

“What is your new work to be, then?” They all watched the paddlewheel steamer approach with near noiseless plash from around the promontory, hugging the shore and heading for dock.

“I don’t know.” Dirk had resolved not to tell the boys or their father that he hoped to find his way to Persia. What he was looking for, he didn’t know. A lost land. A home without the stink of familiarity. He realized this seemed a conundrum impossible to resolve. He might try, though. He, too, had grown up.

“I want you to have this,” he said to Moritz. He had waited until the last minute to decide, and only now had the courage to reach in his satchel. Franz and his stepmother stood a step away; they understood this transaction was more important than sausage or guilders. Dirk took out the Nutcracker. Once Dirk had finished the figure with a gritted cloth and sand, he had used Nastaran’s paints to color the piece into individuality. He replaced the thrush feather of the plume every year or so, and he had oiled the hinged jaw with linseed and lemon juice to keep it from splitting or drying out or chafing. It had gone from nutcracker to Nutcracker, and, in the stories Dirk used to tell when the boys were younger, to “The Nutcracker,” or “Nutcracker, he . . .” The creature had evolved from it to he.

He had a touch of Pan about him still, did Nutcracker, but he wasn’t Pan. Maybe he was the bastard son of Pan and Pythia. “Here. For you.”

Moritz didn’t look at Dirk or at the Nutcracker; he turned his chin and looked back over his shoulder, eager to be done with this. “No.”

“I want you to have it. Really.”

“You want a lot of things. Too bad.”

Dirk was waved away by Franz and Frau Pfeiffer. Moritz hunched in the cart with his back to the lake, his face lifted to the sun, his eyes closed. Not rigor mortis but rigor vitus. Broken as his mother had been broken, and for something like the same reason.

Is it only in childhood that we are capable of taking in the whole world?

What does it do to us that we briefly have that privilege? And then, what harm, when the fund of novelty in human experience runs dry?

Dirk didn’t know how long it would take to get to Bregenz at the eastern edge of the Bodensee. The city had once been under Bavarian rule and was now part of the Austrian empire. From there to Vienna, and on to the east. He would work it out.

He leaned on the rail at the stern of the squat vessel humping its way under summer sunlight, veering toward shore for occasional stops. Somewhere between docking stations, in a sudden fury of anger at Moritz, and maybe a sense of responsibility, Dirk fumbled in his satchel for the Nutcracker. If the Nutcracker could offer no comfort to Moritz, then Dirk had no use for him.

Something stilled his hand. It was as if the Nutcracker had shivered, trembled. A shudder of life from the corpse of a dead walking stick. Am I only less dead, thought Dirk, or readier to live? He pulled his hand away empty, flaring his fingers open at the water, flinging nothing to its depths.

Then on he went, to Vienna, to Bucharest, to Constantinople, to Isfahan, and beyond. The Nutcracker, in his satchel, never complained.