Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(72)

“What has taken hold of you?” Drosselmeier demanded of Sebastian.

The man blew his nose upon his sleeve. “Too much to go into. You cut into a nerve, Drosselmeier. My apologies. Unseemly. The doctors don’t know if she will make it to adulthood. She has an excitable heart.”

“You’re deranged. She’s perfectly normal.”

“I mean the heart muscle. It may be like what my father—Felix—died of. And his grandmother before him. All too suddenly. We don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t know how you wrestled it out of me.” He glared at the older man, bested.

Drosselmeier was aghast at every part of this. “They’re wrong, whoever they are, those doctors. They always are. I knew a doctor who spoke balderdash to me and distracted me from my life. Don’t let them do that to you. She has more life in her two tulip-petal palms than you and I have in our whole frames. She won’t leave life in childhood. She won’t.”

“Don’t bring this up with Clothilde,” warned Sebastian. “She worries so about the girl.”

“She won’t leave this life in childhood,” said Drosselmeier. “She can’t. I won’t let her.”

“We’ll give her a good Christmas, and see if she strengthens in the spring.”

“All this is nonsense!” shouted Drosselmeier. “I won’t have it.”





85.


But Drosselmeier did raise the matter with Clothilde. The next morning he closed up his shop and went by the house when he knew Sebastian would be out at the exchange. The wife was less frail than her husband had led Drosselmeier to believe, or she was better at prevarication. She poured the older man a coffee—in these days, coffee was just starting to be made at home—and they sat in the smaller parlor that looked over the snowy garden.

“Perhaps an infection, it’s hard to say,” said Clothilde. “The good doctors know so little about us, after all, don’t you agree?”

“But what are the symptoms, Frau Stahlbaum?”

“After all this time, you may address me as Clothilde.”

He lifted the cup to his mouth, burning his lips in preference to revising his question.

She relented. She was a steady sort of person, rather hale, with a frame more of oak than aspen. For a strong stork like Clothilde to have given birth to such a frail daughter seemed a wicked taunt. “A fever mounts and subsides, dear Godfather Drosselmeier. They think it’s related to her heart, which sometimes races. There is not much we can do but apply the cold compress and change her nightgown when it becomes too damp. I’m sorry Sebastian worried you about it.”

Perhaps, thought Drosselmeier, she doesn’t perceive the level of threat that Sebastian had indicated. A mother can be so blind. Blindness a skill for survival. He said, “Would you consider taking her for a cure to the thermal springs in Salzuflen, the mineral caves of Berchtesgaden? Something of that order?”

“We wouldn’t rule it out. Though at the moment she isn’t up for travel. And of course we would have to wait for the warmer weather. Perhaps she will improve by then.”

That child was so full of curious observations. “What does Klara say about how she feels?”

This was the only moment when Clothilde seemed distressed. “We are often alerted to the spike in her fever when she begins to spout nonsense. For instance, she sometimes complains that the walls are running with mice. She says that she can hear them talking after we have all gone to sleep.”

“Oh indeed.” He tried not to look either alarmed or relieved. “Does she report their gossip?”

“She says it is very rude indeed and we should be shocked and think she was making it up, and she’d be punished for repeating what she heard.”

“That doesn’t sound ill to me. It sounds rather adult.”

“You profess concern and then you mock me.”

“Please.” He put his hand on hers, truly. “What I mean is that she sounds quite like herself, so how could you tell it is a fever? She is a fanciful child.”

“I was never so fanciful.” She made it sound like a barnyard insult.

He began to think that Clothilde was not a very motherly mother, but then he caught himself. On what basis of comparison could he propose such a scandalous notion?

Yet he looked at Clothilde in her brocaded shoulders, garnets looping around her bust-of-Europa marble neck. Her eye was stern and her wrist trembled slightly as she stirred her coffee. She was a Frenchwoman being maternal in a German setting. How pompous to presume that an old peasant man such as himself, however well traveled, could winkle out the degree of Clothilde’s affection or wisdom about her own daughter.

Neither, though, would he abandon Klara. Just in case.





86.


Drosselmeier’s material needs were few, as he lived quite simply in a pair of rooms over his shop. Still, he wasn’t sorry for the annual coin he earned in the weeks leading up to the holiday. He needed that income. And so the feast-day of the nativity of the Christ Child approached with its usual panic, uproar, and greed.

Sitting at his bench and carving his figurines by what light there was, he watched carts pass. They were trundling in from the countryside with fir trees bound in ropes, intended for sale in the squares and alleys of Munich. In the evenings, if he wasn’t visiting the Stahlbaum household or, once in a while, taking in a string quartet or an organ recital in a chilly church, he lowered the oil lamp on its cord so that it hovered nearer the workbench. He labored with his brushes and lacquers until the midnight bells rang in the church towers. Sometimes later even than that.