Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(70)

Of all the figures he carved for a new generation of Stahlbaum children, Fritz and Klara, he avoided Persians. Young Fritz paid little attention these days to anything but the military, which now could be bought in sets of ten or a dozen. Identical blunt-faced orderlies born industrially, in pressed metal molds. Drosselmeier’s more delicate and individualized figures were reserved as gifts for Klara. A Russian princess in a painted wooden cloak. A Cleopatra in Egyptian blue. A charming family of pigs in graduated heights that stood on hind legs and wore nothing but pince-nezs, all of them, except the very smallest, who with a potbelly and a sour expression stood looking down and sucking her cloven hoof.

Klara: “How do toys think?”

Drosselmeier waited for her to answer her own question. She usually did if he kept silent. She concluded:

“They listen to us and learn to make guesses.”

Then, using his clockwork prowess, he came up with a new Mother Ginger. This variant possessed a real cloth skirt hemmed with a tight lead hoop that, when a button shaped like a bow was pressed in the small of her back, sprang open, not an indecent amount, to reveal a few human children huddled therein. They were thick, dwarflike. Drosselmeier found it interesting that though the overall effect was among his best, it was compromised because he was so poor at doing children. Barbarians, animals, imaginary creatures—all came to life under his set of knives more easily than that most exotic of beings, the local child.





83.


Klara, though, adored Mother Ginger and didn’t seem to mind that her children looked like trolls. “She is my favorite,” said Klara, climbing up on Drosselmeier’s lap the better to handle the bow and open the skirt. She moved the lumpy children in and out, and pulled off the petals of a rose in a nearby vase so the children could have sheets to cover them. Under their crimson snugs they resembled chunks of beetroot. “Does Mother Ginger look much like your mother?”

“I have no mother,” said Drosselmeier.

“Everyone has a mother or they can’t be alive. It’s not allowed.”

“I never claimed to obey the rules. Do you think Mother Ginger looks too old to have these children?”

“She looks old enough to have some more. I wish our Mutter would have a child. I want a baby to rock to sleep and to boss around.”

“You’ll have your own baby soon enough.” For Drosselmeier, time seemed to be moving more swiftly now. “Don’t hurry it.”

“Would it be too rude if the pig family could live in Mother Ginger’s skirt, too?”

“The children might pull the tails of the pigs. The pigs would squeal, and Mother Ginger, what would she do then?”

“She would open her skirt and send them all out to play and scream until they could learn to mind their manners. She would be used to that.”

“What would Mother Ginger do while her children and pigs were out playing?”

“Take off her skirt and lie down. It looks very heavy and tiresome.”

“Ach, stop that, Klara. The dress doesn’t come off. It’s fastened at the waist, see? You’ll tear it.”

“But I mustn’t ever lie down in my good outfit.”

“Mother Ginger is a strong woman. She doesn’t need to lie down. She just goes for long healthful walks.”

“Perhaps she picks up stray dogs and cats under her skirts. Or like that seal we saw once at Meritor, remember?”

“A seal might make an unpleasant mess of Mother Ginger’s costume. Not to mention the smell.”

But smells meant nothing to children, and Klara seemed delighted by the idea, so the next time Drosselmeier came for dinner he brought a set of infantry with bayonets for Fritz, crudely painted, and a seal with a dropsical moustache to join Mother Ginger’s family. Drosselmeier found Klara to be formal and grateful, but he suspected she really didn’t care for the seal after all, for it got lost in short order and was never seen again.





84.


When Fritz and Klara played together, Fritz took the lead and Klara was quiet. If her brother happened to be out of the room, however, Klara spoke to her Godfather Drosselmeier as if in a language only the two of them understood.

Once when she was lying on the carpet with a wooden cat in one hand and a wooden dog in the other, she got tired making them chase each other or dance with each other or stand one upon the other. She rolled onto her back and held them both up and looked at them through a squint-eye.

“They are getting tired,” she said, yawning.

“What should they do?”

“They sleep in an eggshell,” she countered, “when the egg has gone out to take the air.”

He waited.

“When a dog falls asleep, he dreams he is a cat,” she said.

A coal shifted in the grate.

“When a cat falls asleep,” she said, “she dreams she is a fox. And she is.”

A statement like that, for reasons Drosselmeier couldn’t name, made his hair stand on end and the inside of his eye-patch damp. It wasn’t because of a sense of identification with the child, he thought. Not any unseemly intimacy, but the opposite. She lay there only a yard or two away, but so incredibly distant, so fully, ethereally other that it nearly took his breath away. In her six-years-andsome she was already more herself than he had ever managed to become himself in the same number of decades.