Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(71)

Once when Drosselmeier was taking his godchildren for a walk, Klara felt suddenly tired and turned pale, so Drosselmeier decided to turn around for home. Fritz was cross and threw stones at a squirrel, which looked venomously back at the lad, as if contemplating the purchase of a delicate though powerful j?ger rifle to return fire.

At home, Fritz disappeared into the nursery and began to toss toys about, breaking them. Klara drew her godfather into the small yellow parlor and sat him on the settee. She then proceeded to tell him he had come to the café and she would serve him. It was the best café in Prussia.

“What is it called?” he asked.

“You should know, you came in the door,” she replied.

“But I forget. I am old and my memory is poor.”

She puzzled over this. “I think it is called the Boys and Adders Café.”

“Not Kaffeehaus?”

“I am part French. I am the owner and the chef. I also take the money and give you the spoons and stuff. What would you like to eat?”

“What do you recommend?”

“Some food, perhaps.”

“That’s a good start. I enjoy food. Do you have anything special you like to make?”

She climbed under the desk as if it were a kitchen belowstairs, and then emerged with a scrap of paper she must have pulled from a drawer. She looked at it. “This is the menu.”

“May I see?”

“You can’t read it. It is written in a strange language. I shall tell you about it. We have a chicken and olive soup. Also some pears on toast. And, what else. Some biscuits with honey icing.”

“I’ll have the soup.”

“There’s none left. I had the last bowl. It was very good indeed.”

“Bring me what you like.”

She disappeared to the kitchen and returned with an invisible plate. “Here is your food.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know, but I wouldn’t eat it if I were you. It looks nasty.”

He took an imaginary bite. “I think it is a squirrel soufflé.”

She wrinkled her nose. “It would be, wouldn’t it? I wondered where that squirrel went. It was supposed to be peeling the potatoes.”

It took Drosselmeier a while to wonder whether, in fact, there was something strange about Klara Stahlbaum. Different, that is, from the other children he had known in his life. He hadn’t known many. Engorged with greed, children who came into the showroom didn’t count. In any case, German burghers and their wives were more inclined to steal into the shop to make selections without their children in tow.

Of the children he’d befriended, after a fashion, little very accurate could be said. Children were a set of broken puzzles. Sloppy puddings. Throwaway woodcut proofs, blurred outside their margins. And how many children did these examples add up to, in his life? Not many. Not many at all. Franz and Moritz Pfeiffer, back in those horrible days of Nastaran’s breakdown and death. Sebastian and Günther Stahlbaum, when they were glowing golden shadows of golden Felix. These days, yet another generation of Stahlbaums: Fritz and Marie-Claire—Klara as everyone called her.

Klara, alone of them, was a girl.

Maybe that was part of it, Drosselmeier thought. But also, Klara had something of Felix’s glittery openness. A recklessness of heart, you might say. And from her mother, a Gallic hesitancy and tact.

When he turned up at the Stahlbaum home—the fine Munich place that Felix and Ethelinda had left to their older son—something ached in his chest. It was like a muscle tear that couldn’t quite heal because he kept twisting it, wrenching it beyond the range of play. Klara was a cipher, something as much flame as charcoal. The boys he’d known before, he’d liked them and played with them, and even been surprised that he could amuse them so. But they’d stayed in the portable cages of their own characters, just the way he stayed in his, and always had. Klara seemed, on the contrary, frequently to be emerging. Not from silence into sociability—something other than that. From herself into herself—as if she had been born bearing multiple veils of Klara, and they were all legitimate. Echt.

He raised the matter only once, with Sebastian, and was sorry that he had.

“Is she entirely all right?” he had asked.

“Klara?” Sebastian stabbed the bowl of his pipe with hard jerking motions. Flecks of tobacco peppered the table. “Whatever are you talking about, Drosselmeier? Why shouldn’t she be?”

“I only mean…there’s a quality.”

“She’s young, she’s gullible. She believes in fairy tales. Also in the saints of the Church. Give her time, she’ll firm up. Christ, man, you’re hard on her.”

“I’ve offended and I have no idea how. I don’t mean that she’s young. I’m old enough to be able to recognize the young for what they are. I mean that she is . . . fickle. Capable. Capricious. Attached.”

Sebastian Stahlbaum drew on his pipe for several long drafts, which gave Drosselmeier time to formulate a peace offering. “I am trying to find a way to say how charming she is. She hardly seems of this world.”

At this Sebastian threw the pipe into the hearth, where it cracked, and the man burst into sobs. Raw eyes, angry mouth, distended nostrils like a frightened horse. Drosselmeier scrabbled to his feet and went to stand by the door, his hand at his mouth. He had no strategy for such insanity. He couldn’t stop it. Sebastian might have gone on like this for hours but young Fritz came wandering by looking for something to smash. That cleared up his father’s face as quickly as a wet cloth will blank a chalked slate. Sebastian was protecting his son from the sight of distress, Drosselmeier saw. So the godfather found some coins in his pocket and flung them at the older Stahlbaum child, and that diverted him from the room.