Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(67)

“It never is, it never could be you, and yet it is, and could be after all,” said Pfarrer Johannes Albrecht. “Come lean down and give me a kiss, dear boy. What took you so long?”

“I got lost.”

“I should say so. Let me look at you. Stand back. No, that’s too far back. My eyes are tyrants—they like the middle spot in the carpet. Yes, perfect. Oh, my. Dirk! Am I dying even faster than I thought, that you should answer one of my last prayers?”

“I am no answer to a wish.” He pulled up a stool to the side of the bed. “What is wrong with you?”

“I am eight thousand years old, give or take, and the Lord is tired of waiting for me. Saint Peter has parked his celestial char à bancs in the courtyard. Can’t you hear the horses snorting and pounding their hoofs in impatience?”

So Pfarrer Johannes had, in old age, gone fantastical.

Or perhaps he could hear the horses nickering there, after all.

“I haven’t got long,” said the old man. “I don’t mean I am departing for heaven tonight—at least, I don’t feel that I am. But my strength doesn’t last, and you will find me nodding off just as you are about to tell me how you kidnapped Napoleon and conquered Malta and made love to some pretty young wife of a hoighty family. Very von und zu. So speak quickly. What have you made of your life?”

How to answer such a question.

“A long road toward a retreating horizon,” he ventured. “Like everyone else’s.”

“No horizon but heaven.”

“That must be true for you, good father. But the rest of us aren’t so sure of our itineraries.”

“Then you become your own destination, Dirk. That is what happens. As long as you are a person of conscience—of merit—one who makes the attempt—you head ever toward the geography of yourself. But I want the real map! Your own map in time, in days and years. Why did you never return? I was worried fair to desperation.”

Brandishing the sealed greeting: “Here is a reply, after a fashion. The delivery of post is very slow in these parts.” They both laughed, and Dirk continued. “I was taken in as a houseboy of sorts. For a while. One thing led to another.”

“Industry? Marriage? Family? Education?”

“Well . . . none of that. Travel, though. I did travel widely. And now I live in Munich, and make toys.”

“Toys!” Pfarrer Johannes wrinkled his lip. “I’d have thought you’d obey the injunction of Saint Paul and put away the things of a child.”

“One does that when one has stopped being a child, as I recall the verse. So perhaps I’ve never stopped.”

“Or you never started,” mused the old man. “You were sober as a little magistrate when you arrived. No wreathing smiles. No easy games and jokes like other boys.”

“Forgive me for disappearing. I never had a good sense of direction of any sort.”

“I was worried. You worried me. You should be whipped for causing an old man worry.” He relented. “Though I wasn’t as old then, was I? I did look for you. Did you know that?”

“Of course not. How could I?”

“I hired a fellow from the precinct to go out the road toward Meersburg and see if anyone had word of a lost boy. Someone had seen you, but no one knew which path you might have taken.”

Dirk shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”

“You were my responsibility. The good Lord had deemed it so. I had failed you by sending you out into the snares of the world. How happy I am that you were not eaten by more bears!” He began to cry, and then suddenly slept for a moment or two. With closed eyelids, the brightness in the old fellow’s face faded. He looked like a toy Dirk might make out of starch-stiffened old linen.

Shaking himself awake after a bit, the old man seemed surprised to see Dirk still there. “The boy. You. I also sent someone to go to look for your folk. The woodcutter. Have I told you that yet?”

“The woodcutter.”

“Right. Those people you used to call the old man and the old woman. In the forest. I thought you might’ve gone back there.”

“The old man and the old woman. But not my parents. I was a foundling.”

“They weren’t old as all that, according to report. If they were the right people. The man was still alive. He walked with a limp and a stout cane of sorts. His sister was dead.”

“His sister?”

“One of the sins of Leviticus, I fear. Perhaps. ‘Neither should any man approach a close relative to uncover nakedness; I am the LORD.’ I rarely preached on that verse. I thought it was self-evident. Anyway, the sister died of consumption apparently. The woodcutter showed my agent a grave with a stone in which the woodcutter had crudely carved her name.”

“I didn’t know them by name.”

“If I knew his name, I’ve forgotten it. It’s amazing what leaks out of my memory and what stays put. I can’t figure out the method in it. But I remember her name. Gretel, she was. His sister.”

“Perhaps they weren’t the same people,” said Dirk, standing.

The old man was awake enough, alive enough still to hear the tonal change in Dirk’s voice. The cleric stopped speaking for a moment. His eyes closed. Maybe he was praying. Dampness on his cheek. “Perhaps not. One woodcutter is much like the next. Anyway it doesn’t matter now. You’ve come home.”