Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(54)

65.


Baghdad, Samarkand, western Cathay.

He discovered in himself a talent at languages. It was as if his ears had at last grown keener to compensate for the Cyclopean single eye.

He almost married a Chinese woman over the objections of her parents, until he realized just in time he had his own objections, too, even if they were hard to name. It wouldn’t be fair to sacrifice the happiness of Wu Min on the mausoleum altar of the memory of Nastaran.

Though that wasn’t the only reason. Once Wu Min had gotten over a pretty shyness and taciturnity, he’d asked her about her family. She’d gone on for nearly three weeks, roping in the complete histories of such bewildering strands of ancestors, seeming to recall with an ardent and clinical precision every moment of their lives, that he found her close to monstrous. Either she was from an entirely different species or he was. He escaped just in time.

Central Russia, northern Russia. Saint Petersburg. Copenhagen. Stockholm. London.

He honored the German disdain of France and a fear of their bloody revolutionary fervor, so he bypassed petty Paris.

Returned to Germany close to fifteen years after he had left. It had been a diverting exercise.

His satchel was now several trunks. He was getting older and they were too heavy to lug around anymore. He set himself up in business, a small shop behind cheery mullions that looked out over a seedy square east of the center of Munich. Despite the out-of-the-way location, he began to do a brisk business for his carved figurines. Parents called them toys, and bought them for their children. Drosselmeier never contradicted them.

The Nutcracker was travel-weary, chipped and bashed and showing his age. Dirk had made a sword for him out of the old broken knife blade, and fixed it with a leather thong slung around his hips. The Nutcracker presided over the toy shop. His eyes bulged while overlooking his domain. Superior to it, protective while faintly irritated all the time at matters of unknown complication. The only fresh part of him was the thrush feather, which Dirk tried to replace once a year.

Then one snowy evening, as Dirk was about to close up shop and retire his awl and knives to their wallet, and tidy the wood shavings up to feed to the stove, the little bell on the front door tinkled. A late customer pushed through, brushing snow off his lapels. He wore a ginger beard in the Prussian style and his eye was guarded and acute.

“They say you’ve become the best toy maker in town,” he said. “How did I miss you all these years?”

“Well, well,” said Dirk. “Good evening, Felix.”





66.


“So it is you,” said Felix Stahlbaum. He clenched both palms upon the head of his walking stick as if he might pick it up and thrash Drosselmeier with it. His hands were angry but his face seemed wry. The smile was tentative, perhaps slightly acidulous. But what did Dirk Drosselmeier comprehend, now or ever, about what the expressions of people meant? He knew himself to be a simple-minded person. Or perhaps not—but in any case, he communicated as a simple-minded person. It was safer.

Speak in short sentences.

Avoid the abstract.

Beware the extremes of feeling. Enough of Goethe’s poor miserable Werther—let him get on with it and kill himself over that fool Charlotte. Spare us the bombast and the breast-beating.

Admire the little, the low. What lies unnoticed by the steadying gaze of educated citizens of one nation or the next.

Trying to divert Wu Min from the subject of ancestry, he had made the mistake once of asking her about her own early memories. A month later when she had paused for breath, he went for a stroll, hoping to find a way to sever his cranium from his shoulders. The world of delights and advancements, slights and misapprehensions that constituted her young life! She was a savant. She was normal. He was the idiot.

When in turn she had asked him about his childhood memories, he had only answered something about a mother mouse and six babies. She had taken that as a metaphor and assumed he had five dead siblings, and wept on their behalf. His protestations that he didn’t speak with Oriental theatricality were useless. She loved him the more for his apparent deficits and losses.

Wu Min had asked the names of his original carers. He couldn’t supply them. In fact, all he could really say was that, as he’d grown older himself, he’d realized that they hadn’t been quite as ancient as they’d seemed when he was a boy. The old woman had had shapely legs; the old man’s beard had been brown, not grey. They were simply peasants, untutored in the ways of the world and therefore frightened of it.

The less he could answer about his parents, the more Wu Min cradled him, until finally he fled.

The silence in his own head wasn’t the sound of loneliness, he discovered. There was nothing to be lonely for.

Yet here was Felix Stahlbaum. His chin elevated by slow degrees as if he was letting his eyes take their time to accustom themselves to the gloom of the toy shop.

“Some people you expect to see again, and some you never do,” said Felix.

“I expect nothing,” said Dirk. Perhaps he had become a little Buddhist in his travels—it had never occurred to him before. But he stood as he spoke, the work desk between them.

Felix: “Are you closing up shop?”

“That depends. Are you in the market to buy some toys?”

“Are you free to join me at dinner?”

Dirk thought about that. What did free mean? Once the question had been placed in the room, was there any freedom left about the matter? The question really could be stated as this: Was Dirk free to decline the invitation? And he didn’t know if he was that free. On what basis?