Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(76)

Fritz had made some drawings as presents for his parents and sister and godfather. His gift to Drosselmeier showed a regiment of sclerotic soldiers with raised bayonets, each one apparently ready to drive his weapon into the skull of the man standing in line in front of him, except the lead soldier, who was bravely facing down a monster of imprecise species. “There’s about to be a bloodbath,” said Drosselmeier. “I admire the courage of the league of men and also their uncanny resemblance. Identical quadruplets, perhaps? But tell me, dear Fritz, is this enemy a lion shorn of its mane, or perhaps a wild horse having a difficult day? Having left its eye-patch at home? That one eye is immense. Compelling.”

“It’s a spy for the King of the Mice.” Fritz was offended, but not very. “Can’t you see his mouse tail?”

“Beg pardon. A magnificent specimen.”

“I did a better one for Klara,” he admitted. “This one was a little messy. You see the last soldier’s feet are on backward. I forgot by the time I got to the knees and there was no room to make them go forward.”

“All the better for running back to camp and calling for reinforcements,” said his godfather.

“Mine has a very good King Mouse.” Klara spoke more vividly than she’d done so far. She leaned forward to show her godfather.

“Really, you’re making quite much of nonsense,” murmured Clothilde to all of them, but Drosselmeier arranged the paper at a distance where viewing could be clearest.

“Now, this is quite a success, I agree,” said Drosselmeier. “Why seven heads?”

“Because he’s the King,” said Klara. “Everybody knows that.”

“I was practicing heads, but they look pretty good all together, no?” whispered Fritz to Drosselmeier.

“That’s what the King looks like,” insisted Klara.

“And mine is . . . a lovely flower,” said Clothilde, with motherly insincerity.

“You explain mine,” said Sebastian, holding up a muddle for all to see.

“I didn’t get to finish,” said his son.

“I see. A fine study of procrastination, and I shall treasure it.”

“What is going to happen in the battle?” asked Drosselmeier, “or has it already happened?”

“It’s happening tonight,” said Klara.

“What are they fighting over?”

“Dirk, please. It’s Christmas Eve,” said Clothilde, but her daughter was looking around the room, trying to make sense of the question.

“It must be the tree,” she said. Dirk felt the wind from outside come up through the sleeves of his coat somehow, as if he were catching Klara’s fever.

“The tree is very beautiful, I agree,” he said, “but mice don’t live in a tree. Why do they want it?”

“The tree is hung with walnuts,” she said. “Walnuts are good for eating—and the mice are hungry during the wintertime. Snow on the ground. They have to come indoors.”

“I suppose so. And the King of the Mice has seven mouths to feed, all his own.”

“But you need walnuts to plant other trees, too. Walnuts are seeds, aren’t they? They grow in trees.”

“We need seeds to grow trees; that’s true.”

“The toys live in the tannenbaum, because it’s Christmas and the tree is magic now. If the mice win and swarm the tree, over-run it—how horrible, it will become brown and die. But the toys need it. So they will fight to the death to save their own home. Look at so many of them hanging on strings there! It’s their home.”

“I insist,” said Clothilde at last in a voice that could not be gainsaid. But she needn’t have worried as far as Drosselmeier was concerned. He was standing, suddenly feeling frail, and he shambled from the room, knocking against the doorsill as he went.





89.


Drosselmeier knew that at the far end of the long black-and-white-tiled atrium, toward the back of the Stahlbaum house, a set of steps descended to a pair of double doors opening into the garden. Sometimes in the early summer, before the family left for Meritor, Clothilde would invite friends over and serve hock and strawberries under the lindens. It was a bit of a French garden, the way the linden trees were planted in a box formation, all sixteen slim trunks pruned to rise like pillars, branches joining overhead. Drosselmeier was fond of linden. When he did carvings of figurines, linden wood proved supple, accommodating. He knew that no less than Grinling Gibbons had formed linden wood into all sorts of delicacies, as the wood could mimic the details of genuine botany.

Tonight, however, Drosselmeier was more aware of the balsams beyond the stately center of the garden, those that grew up against the stone walls that edged the property. Shaggier than those firs whose limbs lifted upward like the arms of a candelabra or menorah. The snow, which had kept falling since Drosselmeier had arrived with his presents, weighed down the branches of these balsam trees like thatch, turning them into the heaped, furred folds of somnolent woodland animals sleeping on their massive feet.

Breasting the margin on the right side of the garden, being overtaken by growing trees, stood a stone pedestal. Upon it capered a satyr or Caliban of some sort, his leer less erotic than furrowed with worry. Opposite him, through the formal grove on the other side of the garden, a twin pediment featured something like a dryad. At this hour, the stone was black and her filmy garments a sort of nubbly white, but Drosselmeier knew she was usually greened with a light moss, hers being a north-facing prospect.