Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(55)

Yet on what basis might he be free to accept?

“Join me for dinner,” said Felix cunningly, as if realizing that a command was more effective than a request. He rapped the iron head of his walking stick upon the workbench.

“Let me put away the figurines I’ve been repairing.” To buy himself some time, to be able to turn away, Dirk picked up the wooden Zouave in his turban, and the Hussar in his green and gilt jacket, and he put them on the shelf above the stove. In the waves of heat the two figures seemed to buckle at the knees and then straighten up.

“Is this all your handiwork? You have considerable skill,” said Felix. “I shall have to buy something.”

“I am at your service,” said Dirk.





67.


Later, in Dirk’s memory, all the conversations ran together. By tiny adjustments the world shocks itself and becomes bored again at almost the same instant.

But he didn’t forget the first time that they sat over a glass of golden schnapps in the firelight of a small salon behind Peterskirche, where Felix was apparently a regular customer.

Dirk looked at Felix more closely now that Felix wasn’t looming over him. A level edge to Felix’s brow that Dirk didn’t remember. Perhaps a strengthening of certain facial muscles, the ones exercised by wincing. Hard to particularize how a face grows older. Eyes, perhaps, become less romantic and more capable of scrutiny. At least Felix’s eyes—in this light, hazel with a cast of moss. Of the character of his own eye Dirk had no idea beyond its color—cloud blue—for looking-glasses only show the masks we employ, those masks needed in considering ourselves.

“Tell me where you went,” said Dirk, before Felix could pose a question.

The man relaxed a little. “Isn’t what happened to you more interesting?”

“Not to me; I’ve been in my own life too long already. You disappeared.”

“I didn’t disappear. I went back to university.”

“You never came to find me.”

“Well, once I learned what had happened to that woman—Frau Pfeiffer—I wasn’t sure if you’d forgive me.”

“What had I to forgive you for?”

“Distracting you, maybe, from your duties?”

“My duties were my own, and any dereliction of them is a matter I take up with myself, not with you. Not that you gave me the chance after that.”

Felix sipped the schnapps. “I did come by once, you know. The following summer. I was back in überlingen, to stay with the von Koenig family again. One market day the family bundled itself to Meersburg, and I stopped by the Pfeiffer home. You weren’t there, nor the small boys. Only the husband and another person, a woman of some proportion.”

“Ach. Gerwig with Cordula, the second Frau Pfeiffer.”

“I asked after you. Did they tell you?” Felix furrowed his brow in mock indignity.

“They didn’t. But what if they had? I had no social standing to storm the von Koenig parlors to see you.”

“Well, I wanted to know how you were.”

“I suppose they told you how I was.”

“I suppose they didn’t. Does anyone know much about you?”

Dirk laughed. “You were always public! That music. I have never forgotten it.”

“You’re not going to speak about yourself? Again.” Felix toyed with a spoon. “Well. As to the ’cello. Enjoy whatever tissue of memories you have about that. I don’t play an instrument anymore.”

“Oh, no. Don’t tell me that. Why ever not?”

“I accepted at last that I have a better ear than I could ever have fingers or—or musical—. I don’t know the word. Adroitness. Musical wit, if you will. So it was a punishment for me to listen to my own inept attempts at transcendence. Have you ever heard a person who is mostly deaf try to speak? The garble of it? I played like that, all garble. In the end, I wasn’t willing to offend the music or its composers by treating it so shabbily.”

“You had much to offer.”

“You don’t listen to enough music if you think that.”

They ate from the table d’h?te, a veal dish with lemons and carrots and a portion of thin shaven potato slices in vinegar. “I am going to pay for this meal,” said Felix. “So you owe me entertainment.”

“I should have brought my most recent friend: an oaken Mandarin from Old Cathay with a wooden moustache that reaches on two sides of his chin right down to his curly-toed slippers. I’d have made him dance for you.”

“Once, I’d rather you offered to dance for me.”

“Oh, Felix,” said Dirk. What a confusion, to feel flat and alert at the same time. Of that notion of Felix’s about the possession of musical wit—it seemed to Dirk that Felix had had a capacity, while Dirk could feel in himself an absence of wit nearly as firmly as he imagined he might have felt its presence. He struggled for words. “You only needed to ask me.”

“L’esprit de l’escalier. I did try to ask you.”

“This is a fine portion of veal.”

“You were too besotted with Nastaran to hear me out.”

“I don’t like to talk about her.”

“I was crude, I admit it. I played with you, that time we spent a night in the farmer’s barn. In the snow-storm. Do you remember that night? You couldn’t know, but I found out.”