Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(64)

“Not according to this, you’re not,” he said, gesturing to the paper. “You did say you are Herr Drosselmeier?”

Dirk looked as officious as he knew how.

“I see that some of these are letters my brother-in-law sent my sister while he was away in London one year. Explaining to her why he had stepped in and named himself as the father of my child. It seems he had thought he was protecting you, and didn’t learn I was the guilty father for some years. Until it was too late.”

Dirk, not skilled at lying, made a stab at it. “I know that story and, truly, it doesn’t concern me, or even much interest me.”

“You were close to Felix, though. How droll, for him to be shielding a peasant boy from scandal—how could a reputation for scandal have hurt the likes of you? And all along it was my good name he was accidentally saving—at least until the wretched woman, I mean of course my lovely wife, showed up with my genius son.”

“I counted him as a friend,” said Dirk. The only friend, actually.

“And what are you, really, to my sister, from whom I will remain estranged for the rest of my days, it seems?”

Dirk stood again, this time clasping his coat in business-like fashion. “I am a neighbor and a well-wisher of your nephews, Sebastian and Günther.”

“I see she has named you godfather to the boys, and that should she die, you will be the one to raise them up.”

Dirk said nothing. He hadn’t heard that item.

“Godfather, is that what it’s called now. Frankly, I was surprised that Felix could claim to have fathered them. I took him for something of a washout with the gentler sex—indeed, initially I thought his false claim of foisting a child upon a country maiden was intended to bolster for him an unlikely reputation as a ladies’ man. That much I was happy to give to him. As a friend—of course.” Now Kurt von Koenig stood, too. “There’s no written reply to my sister. But I should be in your debt if you could carry my condolences to her on the death of her husband.”

“I’m unequal to that task.”

“I loved him, too, you understand.”

“I shall tell your nephews you send appropriate greetings. They oughtn’t be tainted by the mistakes of their parents’ generation.”

“Whom are they more like? Felix or Ethelinda?”

“I never know how to answer a notion of impossible comparisons.”

“I don’t imagine you want to meet my son, so you can tell Ethelinda what he is like? His name is Adolphus Wolfgang.”

Dirk didn’t answer, just achieved the door before he turned around. “You might do me one favor. Do you know the whereabouts of an old doctor named Mesmer?”

“If you mean the hypnotist, that tendentious human hypnagogue, he died years ago. Disgraced and made much fun of. Few speak of him any longer.”





77.


Dirk wasn’t surprised to learn from the second Frau Pfeiffer that Gerwig Pfeiffer had passed away. “But the boy still lives here, and he takes care of me as if I had give birth to him myself,” said Cordula, now a thickened old woman. “He’ll be along presently. Come in if you like, or stay out in the garden if the house gives you a case of jelly-stomach. But it’s too cold for me to sit here with you. I’ll send out a mug of hot cider. You’re certain you won’t come in?”

He wouldn’t. The outside air, enough.

No ghost of Nastaran had arisen here in the walled garden to welcome him or to affright. Such a terrible, sad absence. The Pfeiffer house was a tombstone standing on an old road that wanted to get somewhere else, but couldn’t—it petered out into fields. Behind it, the twin structure, the barn. Invisible from the street, Dirk realized now, but just as large. Just as real.

Sheets of appearance hung to distract, to conceal.

In this garden, once, walnuts had been strung on strings.

Now the small orchard was falling apart through neglect. Large limbs lay on the ground. It was a battleground. No Florence Nightingale had been through to clear up the corpses. He couldn’t think what this might remind him of.

He felt like a tall old ledger, an accounting book open to a page in midlife, but the sum of knowledge registered herein was slim, and the pages behind were scrawled over illegible, and those ahead empty.

Someone arrived with a cup of cider, aromatic and steamy. It wasn’t Frau Pfeiffer the Next, but a solid tall woman about Dirk’s age, with good skin and grey hair.

“So it is you,” she said. “I thought the old woman was floating in her mind.”

“Frau—?” said Dirk, confused.

She winced. “You don’t recognize me. I’m Berthilde.”

He took the cup.

“Tilda, the boys called me. Tillie.”

He nodded, chagrined.

“The laundress,” she prodded. “I was here the first year you arrived, and I stayed four or five years until my marriage. My husband has died.”

“Condolences, of course…”

“Don’t strain yourself, you. Not worth it. You never knew I was here. You had your eye on the first Frau Pfeiffer, and when she died you went blind. Did you really never know I was waiting all those years for you to look at me?”

He took a sip, unable to confirm her suspicion or to lie.