Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(57)
Dirk didn’t answer, but allowed himself to be swept into the vestibule and then the atrium.
A sort of banner ran above the lintels of the broad doors marking a margin between the ground-floor level and the gallery above. A frieze. It was colored like blancmange and animated with plaster bas-reliefs of Graeco-Roman figures cavorting in procession. The atrium rose two stories, a central well of chillier air within that cheery home. It was bright at the entry level and upon the stairs, and dark up at the ceiling; a canopy of glass upon black iron struts. Grey glass upon which snow had fallen.
Sounds of domestic mayhem sputtered behind closed doors. Unalloyed odors of tar soap and caramelized carrots gently offended. Someone was performing upon a clavichord with stupendous lack of aptitude. A door slammed, a child shrieked, a woman’s voice gave firm command, something fell and smashed. “Papi!” cried a child, and a figure—several figures actually—ran along the upstairs gallery, behind a balustrade with wrought iron teased into flourishes, spears, and sheaves. The noisy arrivants tumbled down the arched stone staircase at the back of the hall.
A manservant, meanwhile, had come to take Felix’s coat and brush the snow away. Dirk was handing his hat to the aide when a flaxen-haired child, a boy most likely, leapt into Felix’s arms. Just behind the lad capered a King Charles spaniel with tangerine markings. The dog, elegant enough, appeared confused and consequently frantic. It skidded to a halt before Felix and Dirk, and ran circles around them, leaping up and nipping at Dirk’s heels and calves.
“Otto! Otto von Blotto!” cried the child. “Stop that!”
But Otto von Blotto was aggravated, and his bark had the curve of the scimitar in it. The sound rang like steel against the marble noses of the busts of eighteenth-century unknowns. “God in heaven, an intruder at last!” called a woman’s voice from above. “So our meek Otto has the menace of the Cavalier in him after all!”
“What’s gotten into him?” asked Felix, laughing. “He’s never like this. Clearly he thinks you are somebody else.”
“I am somebody else,” said Dirk.
“Take Otto away and then come back and give our guest a proper good evening, Günther liebchen,” said Felix. “Oh, the surprise of it.” The child, Günther, picked up the agitated animal and turned away. The dog scrabbled to the boy’s shoulder, fixing Dirk with an accusatory eye, yapping with increased alarm at being exiled. Günther, in green velveteen, seemed all done up for an occasion of some sort. He couldn’t be more than seven, thought Dirk.
The woman descended. “Unexpected society, Felix.”
“Ethelinda, let me present an old friend—Herr Drosselmeier. Perhaps you remember him . . . ? Dirk, this is Frau Stahlbaum.”
Dirk took her measure. She had a slender belly and hips, with a high-waisted gown clasped by a cincture in the Empire style, though under her burgundy sleeves her shoulders were robust and thrown back in a military fashion. She wore a high stiff cap of uncompromising severity. Ethelinda’s eyes were kind and guarded, her skin powdered to bleakness, her chin retracted into her jaw like a turtle’s head into its shell.
“I couldn’t have had the pleasure,” she said. Dirk heard in her sentence a clever ambiguity. She was wary.
“Yes, of course, you might have, at least I think so?” replied Felix, grabbing at her hand and pulling it forward to place it in Dirk’s extended palm. “One summer at your father’s home. On the lake? Surely?”
Dirk raised an eyebrow. Felix had married— yes, he had. A von Koenig daughter. The sister of that university friend, what was his name. Kurt von Koenig.
Ethelinda Stahlbaum, née von Koenig, shook her head. “No matter. How pleasant to make your acquaintance, Herr Drosselmeier. But, Felix, you have forgotten our engagement with the Foersters. I have sent the man over to say you were detained and not to hold the meal. But really, we mustn’t delay.”
“Forgive me, my dove. But isn’t it too late to go out now? It is snowing.”
“This is Munich. In December. It always snows,” said Ethelinda. Her pleasant tone was dismissive and imperious. “I should think they could find a chair for Herr—”
“Drosselmeier,” supplied Dirk. “Madame, it’s all my fault. I hadn’t seen my old friend in many years, and we lost track of the time. I shall take my leave, asking your apologies for the disturbance.”
Günther came back into the hall. The dog was still yapping in some distant closet. “I think it was your eye-patch that frightened him,” said the boy, as his younger brother, a sprite in blue satin, came trudging forward with his thumb in his mouth. “Why do you wear it?”
“Yes, why?” asked the one who must be Sebastian.
To see these lads, Dirk was filled with a horror of loss for Franz and Moritz Pfeiffer. Those kids had been lumpy and ordinary, Persian anomalies, nothing like these elegant male sylphs. But the way the smoky Pfeiffer children had just evaporated into the husks of their sorry, leaden lives—the loss rose in him. He had to turn.
“Boys, such a personal question!” said Felix. “Shame on you.”
“But he’s a person, so of course the question is personal,” replied Günther, covering his own eye with a patch of fingers.
More or less leaving the matter open to discussion, Dirk made a gesture to request his coat again. How foolish, allowing himself to be beached here in a very wrong place.