Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(59)
Felix:
“You so seldom answer me. Am I to be offended?”
Felix:
“Will no one shut that damn dog up?”
Felix:
“Someday it will be too late, Dirk.”
71.
One day, when it was too late, Dirk had found himself in a powder-blue and gilded salon, at a concert to honor the late Frederik Chopin. Though the sinewy, exhaustive explorations called the Nocturnes were still relatively new to the general public, the room was full. The selections were presented by an aesthete with expressive locks, a vampire who played with a violent agitation of his arms. Despite the melodrama of performance, the music itself could muscle up, oh yes, a power to shock.
To avoid losing the Chopin in the service of mere and selfish memory, Dirk struggled to follow the architecture of the piece. If Bach was music for the court and the church, Chopin was music for the bedchamber. Or the moonlit copse. If Bach had been Euclidean, as Felix once asserted, Chopin relied on a different rhetoric. Dirk had no reference for it. Dionysian? An opiated Dionysus.
A recurring spiral in the melodic line, first up but then corkscrewing back to lower registers, with turns and hesitations as languorous as the drip of rainwater from branch to leaf to upraised lips.
In listening to music Dirk usually tried to empty his mind of vapors and images. Tonight, however, the first three nocturnes returned Felix to him in ways it was hard to fathom. Dirk struggled to escape such particularities—how Felix had sometimes looked at him, quizzical, with a half-smile, the way a dog turns its head on its neck as if waiting the answer of an unasked question. What next?
He let the music unfold in his mind a certain apprehension that it took a little while to recognize. There is Felix, dropping out of the sky, tumbling from the basket of a hot-air balloon. (Do people come to us any other way, really?) I am on the ground, knocked out by the contact. Felix is on hands and knees, leaning over me, slapping me awake. What am I trying to say about this? This happened to me, it truly happened. Preposterous as it seems—it’s no more preposterous than anything else. And I remember it here, under the influence of Chopin. Life has made this experience a memory.
Without a memory, what does experience mean—or matter?
He thought of those poor invalids who had been dead and then somehow revived, and how often it had been said they were severed from their true nature. Maybe they had had their memories broken off, and so they weren’t truly alive, not the way others were.
But then memory could kill one—as it had done Nastaran.
At the height of outrageous curiosity Felix had once asked him about the eye-patch. “Behind that black circle, is your bad eye actually still there? You say you lost your eye—do you mean that actually? If you lost it, where is it?”
Of course Dirk hadn’t answered. The truth is, he didn’t know for sure. Maybe the falling tree in the woods had prodded his eye out the way a spoon dislodges a stone from an overripe cherry. Maybe the eye was rolling about in the Black Forest someplace, minding its own business, having experiences without memory.
Oh, the nonsense music could liberate from the wretched mind.
The otherness of it—the wordless significance.
The ’cello music assaulting him with beauty in the decommissioned chapel at the von Koenig schloss. The unplayed dotar in Nastaran’s bedchamber.
Chopin’s theme, a simple descending descant the first time round, articulated itself in the repeat with nuanced embellishment. It was music remembering itself. It meant something different, something more, to hear those simple phrases repeated so soon, qualified by chromatic variations. Clarifications.
Not redundancy, but a hypothesis about how consolation works. A second chance at getting it. A second chance at life.
72.
While Felix was still alive, Dirk visited the house known as Meritor only once. He remembered the circumstances the rest of his life, though, as a kind of coming home. If that sort of comparison wasn’t baseless at its heart.
The Stahlbaum family—its guests and assigns and lackeys—had packed themselves into three carriages. They’d spent the better part of a week on the road from Munich. They’d stopped at Nuremberg. Another night at Leipzig with its publishers, for all Dirk knew, still buying their paper stock from Herr Pfeiffer & Sons back in Meersburg. Then, alighting for several days in grandiose Berlin, they’d heard two terrific concerts.
The boys were bored at the long carriage hours but thrilled with the idea of travel. They were frantic to get to meet the sea. Ethelinda was equally enthusiastic. She had never been farther north than Berlin. Still, only Felix had yet seen the property. Had he promised them too much?
They came upon it toward the end of the sixth day. It sat at the knuckle of a high spit of land on the island of Rügen. At first, all closed up against the sun and winds, the three-story outpost looked as if it must have been built as a fortress against the Danes—or maybe, when the Danes held this region, by themselves as a fortress against others.
The proportion of window glass to stone fa?ade was ungenerous to light. And the grey granite was hewn in larger blocks than a house usually required. The place had something of the air of a temple, or perhaps a banking establishment. But the channel beyond it was glistening, and all agreed the sobriety of the house counterpoised sensibly against the dash and impudence of the sea.