Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(68)



“I’m not home. I’ve never really been home. And I’m leaving, Pfarrer Johannes.” He had to get out of the place. He leaned down and embraced the old man as gently as he could. “Don’t save me a place in heaven, Pfarrer. There isn’t enough room there for someone like me.”

“I reserve the right to petition for anyone I want. I can be persuasive. Just ask my flock. But Dirk? My blessing.” He raised a hand about an inch off his chest and muttered under his breath, concluding, “My blessing, and also my advice. Spend what you have, give it away, Dirk. All, all away. The only chance to replenish yourself is to use up what you are given. It’s called redemption in some circles.”

Dirk took this to heart, though he thought better of offering the old cleric the battered Nutcracker as a memento. Pfarrer Johannes had fallen asleep again, and the housekeeper was at the doorway, tutting and beckoning. “You won’t stay for a bite,” she whispered declaratively.

“No.”

“Ach. I thought not.”

And then he was on his way back to Munich, a smaller person once again, though perhaps a slightly truer one.





Part Three





The Story of the Nutcracker and the Mouse King





80.


Ethelinda survived her husband by nearly two decades. In those years, Drosselmeier became her closest companion and support. He spent every summer with her and the boys at Meritor on the Baltic. The boys were devoted to him until they grew too old to find his games diverting.

Sometimes he wondered if he’d ever given them the kind of organized attention they deserved. After they were grown, he conceded that he’d often muddled up Günther and Sebastian Stahlbaum, those doughty bürgerlichs, with Franz and Moritz Pfeiffer, the mixed-blood sons of a small-town merchant. None of the boys were alike at all, if he admitted the testing of his memories. On the sidelines of the tiresome business of his life, they’d seemed little more than interchangeable pairs of boys.

That fairy godmother of Cinderella must have learned her trade at a better establishment than Drosselmeier did. He’d been blind to the boys in more than one eye. In short, he’d failed them all, godfather or no.



To make up the loss of income from summer months and to occupy himself during long afternoons, he took up clock repair. He developed a touch and, when back in Munich, began to build clockwork into a line of increasingly complicated toys—though simple anonymous dolls and armies of perfectly matched soldiers made up the better part of his income.

In all those years with the widow, never any question of marriage. During his more rueful moments he imagined that Ethelinda kept him around in order to boast of ownership of her Felix even after his death. But Drosselmeier learned to avoid that path to desolation. Ethelinda did have superior claim, after all. And, though perhaps clueless, Drosselmeier wasn’t absent from the boys even when they’d grown from lumpy kids playing games of mermaid and Poseidon and sea snake at the tidal pools—fashioned from driftwood just so!—into sleek male princes, attracting the gazes of fr?uleins. He stood up for young Sebastian when he married a sober mademoiselle from Lyon. Her name was Clothilde. She had a high forehead and a tendency to be confident. She tolerated Drosselmeier with a philosophical neutrality.

In time, Ethelinda followed her husband to the grave. Neither her brother, Kurt, nor anyone from that side of the family bothered to attend the services. The son, Sebastian, found their absence something of a mercy. The other Stahlbaum boy, Günther, couldn’t contribute to the obsequies either, as he had moved to someplace across the ocean known as Ohio.

Sebastian brought his bride to Meritor. The spare, windblown terrain reminded her of summers spent on the Frisian coast. Clothilde had not enjoyed those summers, and Meritor was not a great success with her. When she became pregnant with her first child, she claimed the prerogative to cancel the annual trip. She wanted to christen the first child Alphonse, but Sebastian demanded a more Teutonic name, so he became Fritz. Four years later, when a daughter was born, Clothilde thought she had prevailed by insisting on Marie-Claire. Yes, Marie-Claire at the baptismal font—Drosselmeier weaseled into the role of actual godfather in both instances by dint not of faith but of his provenance with Pfarrer Johannes Albrecht—as the water rippled over the child’s pale pink brow. As she grew, German custom won through, and the child became popularly known as Klara.





81.


Drosselmeier found, as he aged and stiffened, that he was becoming more interested in Hellenic matters. To the extent that he remembered the bizarre imaginings of his youth, they became entwined with what he was reading about the pan-Athenian festival. Evidence of which had been carved into eternity in the stones of the Parthenon, long ago removed to London and now displayed free of charge in the British Museum. The fuss those marbles had engendered had only grown these fifty years since. Wealthier Germans were traveling to Athens to see for themselves.

Drosselmeier read Homer in translation. He remembered something that Felix had said once about Athena being the model for the fairy godmother who had become, by now, not only a stock figure in tales popularized by Grimm, but also a personage abducted and pressed into service, in one form or another, by the Danish fabulist Hans Christian Andersen. The Athena/godmother seemed to be everywhere in stories. Wasn’t that godlike of her? Always in disguise, like Christ in the urine-stained beggar beyond the newsstand. Like Elijah at the supper table, usually figured as a stranger with a hood over his brooding eyes.

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